I think I just had a "Eye-opener" moment. While I have been thinking
about reducing the modal dialogs and decoupling things, I think
somewhere along the line I forgot almost entirely about the usability.
After reading the above feedback, I realize, Symbology suite will have
to provide tools that would allow live experimentation and editing. It
should be something like the toolbar of a graphics editor.<br>
<br>
Nathan, the link was really an eye opener.<br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 7:06 AM, Nathan Woodrow <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:madmanwoo@gmail.com">madmanwoo@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div class="gmail_quote"><div class="im"><div><br></div></div><div>I'm going to be a -1 one on this proposal. I, like Antia, do a lot of experimenting in the style dialog and I don't like the idea of having to go somewhere else to define my custom symbols/or use them. </div>
</div></blockquote><div><br>I think I will stick with the decoupling, but <br> - make the editing affair a
Dockable Widget, that would render the changes on-the-fly or on request
in the main canvas itself. <br> - Have icons in the dock to perform actions like symbols editing activities and symbol management (say a import button to add the remote symbol repository)<br> - Effectively utilize the single clicks, double
clicks and the Right-click context menus on the symbols in legend to perform legend item specific tasks rather than to layer properties. Layer properties can be called by double-clicking on the layer itself anyway.<br><br>
So its about two things, one a whole new dockable widget that would allow all the customization things like creating symbols, and the second is adding power to the legend to apply any symbol at any state, or even change the renderer for the entire layer.<br>
<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div class="gmail_quote"><div class="im">
<div> </div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><div>
+ Create a new symbol designer, that can be summoned up from Menu rather than from the properties<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div></div><div>-1. If we have to go down the route of have a split designer it must be easily accessible from the same place that you would pick the symbols. Making the user exit out of the properties dialog to define a new symbol would be bad. </div>
<div class="im">
<div> <br>
</div></div></div></blockquote></div><br>Now that the entire symbology editing is brought out as a dock which will let you perform all the editing, saving of symbols live on your map, I think going somewhere just once to summon that dock won't be much of a turn-off :)<br>
<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Regards<br>Arunmozhi<br>Twitter: @tecoholic<br>Website: <a href="http://arunmozhi.in" target="_blank">http://arunmozhi.in</a><br>IRC Nick: teco<br><br>