<html><body><div style="color:#000; background-color:#fff; font-family:arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:10pt"><div><div style="font-size: 10pt; ">GeoMOOSE has a problem. It tries to let users do a lot of things that, ultimately, will cause them harm.</div><div style="font-size: 10pt; "><br></div><div style="background-color: transparent; ">The Scenario</div><div style="background-color: transparent; ">---------------------</div><div style="background-color: transparent; ">A user is going along identifying things. Then they decide to add a <span class="yshortcuts cs4-visible" id="lw_1354627675_0" style="cursor: pointer; color: rgb(54, 99, 136); border-bottom-width: 2px; border-bottom-style: dotted; border-bottom-color: rgb(54, 99, 136); ">Polygon</span> to the map. Then they want to identify things again, so they simply return to the identify tab.</div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><br></div><div
style="background-color: transparent; ">The application fundamentally breaks here. It will try to draw polygons and identify things at the same time. This isn't a problem if the user were to, once again, click the "Identify" tool from the toolbar.</div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><br></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><br></div><div style="background-color: transparent; ">There are variations on this tune but the underlaying question to it all is, how should we be defining the users verb focus? And how do we do it in a consistent predictable manner?</div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><br></div><div style="background-color: transparent; ">Some thoughts:</div><div style="background-color: transparent; ">1. When switching to any tool, any "service tabs" close. That means, the users' ability to add a polygon would close the "identify" tab. Removing the users ability to go after
the tab. This has the negative consequence of not being able to refer to your results for as long or allow the results to interact with other tools.</div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><br></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">2. The root of these problems seem connected with some lack of consistency with drawing. The vector layers are handled separately from the layers that are used as "temp drawing layers" for the services. We could move the drawing and editing tools into a "tab" so that instead of doing things like "Add Polygon", the user would click a button like "Edit Vector Layer" or "Add Sketches" and it would open a service-like tab that would give all of the layer editing options. The may mean creating a tool for each vector layer the user wants to have editable.</font></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><font
face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><br></font></div><div style="background-color: transparent; "><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Anyone with other thoughts? Solutions? Patches?</font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><br></font></div><div><font face="arial, helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">PS: I'm sorry if this shows up as a duplicate, I sent this email yesterday afternoon and it didn't appear to show up on the list.</font></div></div></div></body></html>