Those who consider themselves a developer have a reason to smile today. Google has now open sourced one of the helpful tools used by its Android and Chrome OS teams to measure touch and audio latencies - the WALT Latency Timer.
Over the years, Google has already been using this instrument in the development of its Android and Chromebook products, particularly in gauging, understanding and lessening latency, or the time it takes for a particular interface or app to respond to a user's input.
"We're now opening this tool to app developers and anyone who wants to precisely measure real-world latencies," says Mark Koudritsky, a Google software engineer, in a blog post published on April 4. "We hope that having readily accessible tools will help the industry as a whole improve and make all our devices more responsive to touch and voice."
Managing the latency of a specific product is critical as users prefer to a use a more responsive device, or a device that responds instantly to their touch or voice.
Koudritsky says that other previous methods developers used in examining latency has centered on analyzing the single round-trip latency number. If one needs to know the breakdown of each portion of the round-trip latency, there were no tools available to do so.
Thankfully, WALT has arrived, bringing in the capacity to easily break down latency into input and output components.
Said to be an offspring of Quickstep, a USB tool, WALT allows developers to separately calculate both input and output latencies, as compared to measuring the round-trip latency. This is possible by synchronizing a particular product with an external hardware clock within a millisecond.
Building the WALT is easy. In fact, Koudritsky explains that even those who only possess basic hobby-electronics skills can make this tool by themselves. Another good thing is the parts to use when building this instrument will cost not more than $50.
Those who are interested in building their very own Walt tool can learn more at its repository on Github. Google has even discussed the steps on how to build it, the parts to be used plus the instructions on using this tool.
WALT is not the only product Google is dishing out to people across the globe.
A few days ago, Google also began giving away its $149 photo software suite Nik Collection for free.
