Discussion re: new PreRelease & Frame defaults for EP2

[David McFarlane]

Michiel,

I moved this discussion over here from the "clock
and echo problem" thread. Well...


1) For the most part, I like this change. Let me explain...

Once I understood the actual math of PreRelease
vs. NextTargetOnsetTime & TargetOffsetTime
(something that PST never documented, I am
working to correct this now), I found that using
an ample PreRelease greatly simplified many
coding & timing tasks. Using an ample
PreRelease, I can run some inline code during a
sitmulus, and still have the next stimulus
presented *precisely* according to the time
settings in the stimuli themselves, without me
having to do anything in my own inline code! --
none of this clumsy & sloppy "add the unused time
to the Duration of the next stimulus" or "add a
loop to wait for the next object onset time"
stuff -- properly used, PreRelease takes care of
all of that for you! (If only PST had told us
this from the beginning, but I digress...)

So in many of my designs now, I want to set
PreRelease to the same value as Duration. Sadly,
until recently, there has been no automated way
to do that. So I might manually set PreRelease
in a stimulus to the same literal value as its
Duration, but once I turn the program over to the
user, goodness help us if they later go and
change the Duration! (One lab has a sign up
reminding users to always change PreRelease to
the Duration!) So I wanted a "(same as
duration)" option for PreRelease, and was very
glad when I saw it in EP2.0.10.182.

But what about making this the new
default? Well, IMO, more often than not, this is
what the user really wants, or at least ought to
want. Now, I say "more often than not", but
maybe not much more often. Changing this default
will cause some new problems, while solving a lot
of other problems, some that users don't even
know that they have. Actually, the new default
would have caused a *lot* of problems, but PST
has also worked hard to implement complementary
changes to avoid those (e.g.,
FeedbackDisplay.ProcessInputObjectPendingInputMasks,
Procedure.ProcessPendingInputMasks, StopAfterMode
for Sound & Movie object; note also that PST has
now deprecated ClearAfter, as this will not work
well with the new default value of PreRelease --
an overdue move, IMO). These changes do not
solve everything, but I really believe that the
net effect will be to let most users get the most
out of E-Prime without having to think so hard
about PreRelease, and in the long run this will
solve more problems than it causes. But we do
have to get used to thinking along these new
lines, and taking control of the new time
programming options that go along with the new default for PreRelease.


2) I may not be typical here. I write a *lot* of
small demo programs to explore & figure out
E-Prime (I mean, a ***lot***), and I almost never
really want my stimuli to completely fill the
screen. Often this poses no problem. But all
too often, when I have long text passages to
display, they reach right to the edges of the
display, and that looks sloppy. Then I have to
go and manually adjust the frame size down to
provide some margins, etc. A default frame size
of 75% each way will just spare me that trouble,
so this change actually fulfills another item on
my own E-Prime wish list. But in this case, I
agree this change may not suit others so well.


But with that all said, note that, if you develop
programs using the Professional file format, then
you may customize the Toolbox defaults as you
like, including PreRelease, Width, Height, etc.
(see
http://www.pstnet.com/support/kb.asp?TopicID=4896
). Save your changes to a template file, and
then whenever you start a new program from that
template, voilà, every Toolbox item uses your
preferred defaults! So, no need to wait for PST
to change the defaults back, you can do this
yourself (if only on a user-by-user basis)!

Of course, this works only for files using the
Pro format, which brings up another issue. Long
ago I advised everyone to use EP2 Pro, but to
stick to the non-Pro file format for the sake of
widest compatibility with colleagues. But
starting with EP2.0.10.182, Pro offers many
features too good to pass up, so I am reversing
my advice. From now on, all *research* users
should still spend the extra money to buy Pro,
and then develop everything using the Pro file
format. That will break compatibility with
colleagues who were too cheap to buy the Pro edition, but that can't be helped.


So, as I belive I said in earlier thread, overall
I am very excited with all the improvements that
came with EP2.0.10.182 -- it looked just as if
they acted on all my complaints from over the
years! But I still have to go over these in more
depth, and will have to see how these changes
work in practice. In fact, some of these changes
already break some of the exercises in my online training videos :(.

Best,
-----
David McFarlane
E-Prime training
online: http://psychology.msu.edu/Workshops_Courses/eprime.aspx
Twitter: @EPrimeMaster (twitter.com/EPrimeMaster)


At 9/7/2012 09:48 AM Friday, Michiel Sovijarvi-Spape wrote:
>Hi David,
>Slightly off-topic, what do you think of this default? I thought myself it
>was rather strange of PST to change, suddenly after all these years (and
>dozens of pre-release versions, with none having these defaults AFAIK) to:
>1) set pre-release to duration by default, so that inline code after the
>object is executed before the end of the object (not very transparent coding
>at all - one wouldn't be able to see this from the structure)
>2) set textdisplays to 75% by default. I can see how they like to show off a
>feature that has been there since forever and can really be extremely useful
>and which people often fill in with needless extra slides. But I noticed,
>when I last made a presentation about e-prime, that I very often had to say
>"oh, yeah, sorry, forgot to turn width to 100%", until I just made an
>unreferenced object which I copied whenever I needed a new "blank" display.
>It's almost like Microsoft would suddenly just publish your calendar without
>asking to the world (with option somewhere hidden to not do this): a useful
>feature, to be sure, one which few people probably use, and maybe not use
>for simple reason that it's a bit hidden in the GUI. But to think the
>solution is it should be on by default? Then again, maybe they have some
>better reason that eludes me?
>
>I hope they can change it back, it's pretty annoying.
>
>Best,
>Michiel

[Hyun-Sook Kang]

Hello,

I was wondering whether anyone had run into a situation where E-Run stopped working during a test. I'm using a timed grammatically judgment test with a joystick on E-Run. The joystick stopped working on three occasions on two different computers. Anyone with any experience about how to deal with a situation like this?

Thanks!

[David McFarlane]

Replying to an existing thread and changing the Subject does *not*
work to start a new thread, it merely adds your message to the
existing thread (sometimes even changing the original thread title),
thus "hijacking" the thread.

If you want to start a new thread, please start from scratch and send
a new message to e-p...@googlegroups.com . Do *not* reply to an
existing thread unless you mean your message as an extension of that thread.

Posting this with the original thread title, hoping to maintain
thread integrity.

Thank you,
-- David McFarlane

[Alphonse Stickle]

try new joystick

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[mcfa...@msu.edu]

Please folks, do *not* respond to this thread with any further
discussion of E-Run, joysticks, etc. This is a hijack of the original
thread on "new PreRelease & Frame defaults for EP2", as you may see at
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/e-prime/bvTbL-QMgu8/discussion .

The OP has already started a new thread entititled "E-Run stopped
responding to a joystick", as you may see at
https://groups.google.com/d/topic/e-prime/KbOLgELKrqQ/discussion , and
you may post responses to that thread instead.

Thank you,
-- David McFarlane