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In our continuous effort to enhance the performance analysis capabilities of PS Tool, we’ve focused on refining our feature, highlighting long frames. This feature helps identify frames that remain on screen longer than expected based on the current device’s frame rate, pinpointing areas where the main thread is overwhelmed, particularly during scroll performance analysis. Building on this, we’ve updated our highlighting strategy for frames on Android.

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PS Tool now highlights fewer frames, taking into account clusterization to better focus on scroll performance analysis. This means we only highlight frames that take 2x longer than expected and clusters of several longer frames, even if they don’t reach the 2x threshold. This approach confirms the same frame patterns previously reported via PS Tool by performance analysts while significantly reducing noise. 

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How it looks now: fewer frames highlighted, clear focus on UI Thread Hangs.

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This feature allows engineers to see product analytics and custom performance metrics in traces. Got a signal from your APM that screen loading time took longer? With this feature you will be able to easily find the exact location on a timeline and see the root cause of the issues on the trace.

After the setup, traces will be automatically annotated with product metrics (displayed as grey flags) and placed on the timeline by PS Tool. This replaces the repeated effort required to locate and annotate each product metrics for every new trace recorded, while also ensuring that no business important metrics are left behind.This streamlines the identification of performance metrics and allows engineers to focus on root-cause analysis.

The Quick Start Guide assists engineers during the onboarding experience by providing concise and simple instructions to help them leverage the full potential of the PS Tool.

The Quick Start Guide will be accessible to users within the tool at all times, ensuring that immediate support is readily available.

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The Quick Start Guide comprises 3 main components:

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1. Introduction Video A concise, less than 1-minute video that provides an overview of how PS Tool works.‍
2. Step-by-Step Guide A detailed step-by-step guide on how to perform various tasks using PS Tool. This section ensures that users gain a solid grasp of important features that can empower their analysis.
3. Tutorial on how to identify insights Building upon the features learned in previous section, this session focuses on guiding users on how to use these features to find insights efficiently with real life examples and best practices.
   

At Product Science, we believe that optimizing your app's performance should start with the most important screens for your business—ones that drive engagement and app retention. In this release, we are reinforcing our approach by helping our customers define the most critical user flows even before the team begins to look at the code.

• In the new Annotations screen, even non-technical customers will be able to easily mark the beginning and end of the user flow that requires performance optimization. This is achieved by placing human-readable annotations on top of the video.
• The new Processes x Annotations screen provides tools to connect the human-readable annotations to the code level of your app, making it easy to understand exactly where on the code level the user flow starts and ends.
• The updated Trace Viewer screen will highlight the beginning and end of the user flow so engineers can focus on this specific part of the trace and disregard the rest.

New Screen - Annotations

The new annotation screen enables you to mark the beginning of a user flow (i.e. the user’s action) and the end of a user flow (i.e. the reaction from the app) based on your screen recording.

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New Screen - Processes x Annotations

The PxA Screen enables users to connect annotations made in the previous Annotations screen to slices. This step will allow us to mark the beginning and end of the user flow on the code level. Joining videos and slices together provides solid visual cues that can’t be gained from the code alone.

New Feature - Video preview synced with trace

With the new Video synced with trace feature you will be able to see what’s happening on the phone screen at every point of the recorded trace.

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Video synced with trace feature allows you to:

• Quickly find the beginning and end of user flows
• See the user actions
• Visually identify performance opportunities (like jitteriness, lags and long network requests)
• Visually identify when the screen was updated

Seeing how your application functions in real life provides valuable context that helps to understand what’s happening - even when the code is hard to follow:

• Ability to upload recorded video via PS Tool Web UI to a specific trace
• Video preview thumbnails that allow you to quickly navigate video on the global timeline
• Video tab
    •   Large Preview of the video recording
           •   Ability to play and pause video
           •   Ability to loop video
           •   Ability to delete video

Companion App

• Ability to upload recorded video via Companion app to a specific trace
• Added information with User Flow description
• Added information with project platform information in the project list
• Added information with user role

Trace Viewer

• Vertical scroller on flamegraph, with the ability to jump to the top or bottom
• Ability to pin a selected choreographer and made it available to anyone opening the trace
• Disable pin-zoom for non flame chart elements

Misc

• Updated technical copies to human readable copies for all error messages

Admin Screen

A system for monitoring, maintaining, and controlling user access to your teams and projects. This is where you can:

• Update project icons and details
• Remove project
• Update team member's role
• Send/Resend invitation link 
• Add/Remove a team member
• Enable/ disable the domain allow list so that team members of your organization can join

Login Screen

• SSO with Google
• Reset password
• Register account

Flow Library 

• Ability to add, save and edit Flow titles and descriptions.

Trace Viewer

[New]

• Tools to prioritize and deprioritize threads so that you can better see an execution path

• Pin thread

• Deprioritize thread

• Toggle to show all paths or the main execution path

• "Show all paths" lets you see additional information about how things are executed, while "Show main execution path" lets you see the most straightforward path. 

• Toggle to sort threads to prioritize execution path (Hot Key: K). It provides you the ability to hide threads irrelevant to the execution path temporarily and see the execution path better.

• Toggle to dim slices outside execution paths (Hot Key: P). All functions outside of the execution path are dimmed for better visibility. 

• Choreographer auto connections (Android only). Save your time by manually clicking on slices executed under the choreographer during the initial exploration process.

[Improved]

• Slice name and connection lines styles updated for readability enhancement
• Ability to zoom into small slices and read their names.

Mobile app

• Ability to create Flows 
• Ability to share and upload traces to PS Tool and
• SSO with Google

Miscellaneous

• Customer Support System
• You can now file a bug or feature request directly to us. 
• Documentation 
• You can now find all the information from what is PS tool, different performance optimization tracing concepts to step-by-step guides on how to use it.

Flow Library

• Create, view and delete flows
• Sort flow by favorites, popularity, last edited, and by name

Flow View

• View the list of traces associated with a specific flow 
• Edit flow name and description
• Subscribe to flow updates
• Add new traces
• Select from unassigned traces
• Manually upload traces
• Quickly filter by "My traces only”
• Filter any field of the table and remove traces from the flow or attach them to a different flow

Unassigned traces view

• Assign traces to one or multiple flows
• Quick filter by "My traces only”
• Filter any field of the table
  

Trace Viewer

• Main Timeline (Flame Chart)
    •   Display slices on timeline, sorted by time
    •   Display slices full name on hover
    •   Ability to zoom with WASD or trackpad
    •   Arrow measurement. Enable you to understand the duration of one function to another
    •   Ability to add/remove any thread to favorites

• Global Timeline (Aggregation View)
    •   Display preview of the whole timeline in a condensed view
    •   Ability to set start and end of the focus zone of the video timeline, synced with the flame graph timeline
• Search 
• Connections
    •   Build new connections
    •   Build connection with real-time feedback
    •   Visually highlighting slices available for connections

• Flags
    •   Ability to add/remove flag
    •   Ability to drag and change flag position
    •   Ability to label, change color, and add notes to flags

• Details View
    •   Display slice info
    •   Display execution path info
• Execution paths feature
    •   Ability to show the full execution path available for the selected slice
    •   Filter out inactive threads and sort remaining threads by start time
    •   Show only the necessary depth of thread