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Improved performance for monitoring applications


In short

Docklight and Docklight Scripting just became faster and better looking. Grab a preview of the upcoming update:

The Full Story

The Docklight software tools certainly have a history, with the first Docklight released in 2002. This does not stop them from working flawlessly on any recent 32 or 64 bit Windows system with a huge range of serial communications hardware and software, but there was always one well documented limitation:
Docklight is only as fast as its communication output formattingSpecifically the Rich Text Format (RTF) display can be a true bottleneck in any communication logging that produces a lot of color changes, e.g. due to different data directions, timestamps or control character comments.

We now carefully reworked the related code and found a much improved solution which increases RTF formatting speed by factor 3-5. The updated Docklight is also able to detect overload situations. It will signal them in the main status display and automatically switches to "Plain Text Mode", which is typically 10-50 times faster than "Colors&Fonts Mode". 

We brushed up the overall looks, too - Docklight now uses the modern Windows 8/7 standard fonts with much improved readability. (The old "Courier" font is still in use for "Plain Text Mode" though, since it is a Bitmap Font which renders somewhat faster than a True Type font.)

So feel free to try out a preview for the new features and looks:

Both software packages support the advanced Docklight Tap Pro and Docklight Tap 485 monitoring accessories and should provide much improved performance in typical full-duplex monitoring applications.

See also the readme.txt file inside the .zip archive and our news about USB HID support for more information about other useful additions.

Please keep in mind – this is a pre-release software provided for individual customer support and evaluation. Though it has passed our automated testing procedures, it is not recommended for production use. The new features are also not yet included in the manual, and are subject to change.

As usual, any feedback, suggestions, praise or criticism is highly appreciated!

Marco Flachmann and Oliver Heggelbacher
- The Docklight Developers -





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