far future: alternate UI metaphors for ngscopeclient

[jwise]

Currently, ngscopeclient takes the UI metaphor of, well, an instrument on your desk. This is certainly an improvement in many cases -- the DHO4000 on my desk has a laggy UI, and it would be nice to be able to explore individual captures that I get from it in a much more responsive fashion.

But there are other UI metaphors that might make sense, especially around using scopehal-apps for research, rather than just for individual measurements. For instance, my lab debug time is usually structured around running experiments and collecting data, and it's not clear which data will be useful in the future; I often want to go compare a better way of taking a measurement that I learned later in my debug against a capture that I took earlier, so I can see how much improvement I got. Or when I move from thrashing around to needing to do structured debug on an issue, it is nice to textually annotate previous results with what I did, and tell a story around them.

What UI metaphors might make sense for this, other than 'replica of an instrument'? In the back of my head, I am sort of thinking about: what would it be like to have a lab notes interface that saved all captures all the time, and makes history a first class feature (I am thinking about, for instance, OnShape). Or, what would it be like to drive ngscopeclient from a Jupyter notebook, and embed interactable captures as output cells?