Report from SWAP 2014

Sequence Generator
1

Last week I attended the SWAP conference in Tucson. I had a chance to talk to several folks about SGP and thought I would share some of the feedback here.

There were basically three types of people I ran into

  • SGP users with the attitude like: I use it, it is amazing, why would I want to use anything else! (I am in this category :))
  • SGP newbies. Heard about it, cautiously easing themselves into it one feature at a time (sequences, AF, plate solve, …)
  • The blank stare. Never heard of SGP and/or fully entrenched in the popular older generation image capture apps. This was the vast majority of people I think. SGP is still pretty low on the radar, at least in that sample of the AP community if my impression was correct. Warren did mention SGP in his talk on AP software, so that was good. His comments were along the lines of “I have not used it but I have a friend who raves about it.”

Here are some feature requests I heard:

  • Apply profile to sequence. You can currently save a sequence to a profile, then use the profile when creating a new sequence. But sometimes you may want to apply the updated profile to an existing sequence.
  • Ability to change sequence progress counter. The sequence progress counter tracks number of subs taken vs total requested subs. Sometimes we throw subs away, but the counter cannot be decremented to reflect that, so you have to increase the total number of subs. It gets confusing how much progress you have actually made. I met one person who uses a binary editor to modify the sequence file to decrement the number! If that’s not an indication that there’s a need for a ui change, I don’t know what is :grin:
  • Ability to rotate through targets during a session. For mosaics, it would be nice to rotate through the panels taking some number of subs on each panel. Loop back to the first panel after the last panel.
  • Ability to rotate through events proportionally. We currently have the choice to finish events or rotate through them. In case you are taking more Lum subs than R or G or B, it would be nice to be able to do something like L,R,L,G,L,B,. This is doable now by making L,R,L,G,L,B events but it is a bit cumbersome and gets confusing regarding how much progress you actually have in Lum.

There were probably more comments but my notes have gone missing after the trip. Was anyone else at SWAP? What did you all think?

Andy

2

Good report Andy. Wish I could have been there. I would suggest adding all of the feature requests to the feature requests sub category. I’ve actually thought about all of those myself, but since they aren’t “mission critical” I never bothered to add them myself.

3

Andy,
Thanks for the report! I will say at least one of those features exists :slight_smile:

http://www.mainsequencesoftware.com/Content/SGPHelp/ApplyaProfiletoanExistingSequenc.html

I believe the others are already on our backlog.

Thanks,
Jared

4

Thanks Jared, that’s good to know. So that method creates a new sequence based on the old sequence, but using the updated profile. If you wanted to update the existing sequence from the profile you would do:

  • Open the sequence
  • Select “New sequence with profile…”
  • Select the profile and make sure “Preserve…” is checked.
  • Now you have a new sequence (“Untitled”)
  • Click File=>Save Sequence
  • Locate the original sequence file
  • click OK to save, then Yes to overwrite

I think I got that correct, right? Perhaps I could submit a new feature request to simplify the process, maybe a menu item “Update Sequence from profile…”?

Andy

5

I, also, was at SWAP (Andy, it was great meeting you and I am looking
forward to doing some PHDv2 development!)

I would echo Andy’s view of SGP exposure. I was pleasantly surprised to
run into several people who were avid SGP users, but also amazed at how
many folks had not heard of it. Several of those got my “Plate solving
and autofocus will change your imaging life” spiel! Maybe there could
be an “official” SGP-based presentation next year?

I am also the one who has edited the sequence file to “fix” the exposure
count. It was not nearly as hard as it sounds and was easier than
renaming a bunch of files later on.

  • Shane