[GRASS-dev] gis.m improvements

[Benjamin Ducke]

Michael, Cedric and everyone involved in improving the GUI

I just tried out your latest changes and they are great.

Here are some things that should be really easy to do and improve
the interface experience further:

1. The intro screen uses to much bold font formatting.

2. Likewise, bubble hints should be formatted with normal font weight.

3. NVIZ respects my system settings for menu colors. I think so should
the GUI module forms and gis.m. It just integrates much better
with the rest of the user desktop.

4. querying raster maps from a Map Display is buggy: if my working
region is set smaller than the raster's total extent and I
user "Zoom to selected map", querying will return NULL values "*",
for all parts of the displayed map outside the working region.

5. I think there are too many "add some layer" buttons in gis.m's
icon bar. I alwas need a few seconds to find the one I need.
I would suggest reducing this to the principle icons for
rasters, vectors, labels and misc and adding a little dropdown box
next to each which will reveal additional addable layer types.

6. There should be a menu entry "Layers" in the menu bar, right
next to "File" in which the user can find all functions that
are currently only reachable via icons:

Layers
	Raster
		Add raster layer
		Add RGB or HIS
		...
	Vector
		Add vector
		Add thematic
		...
	Labels
	Misc
	...
	--------
	Edit layer (digitize)
	Show layer info (r.info, v.info, ...)
	Zoom to current layer
	NVIZ
	...

7. The Config menu should really be removed and all its
items added to File -> Settings.
HOWEVER, prior to this, the old "Settings" item should
be removed to "Workspace". And moved to the top of
the "File" menu.

8. The Workspace icons I think need to move to the top left
position in the icon bar, to reflect the order of the
drop-down menu.

9. The file menu needs to get a "New Map Display" item, preferably
below the "Workspace" menu item (see above).

10. I really think that some layer options (especially
for vectors) should be grouped using tabs, like:

Symbology|Labels|Queries|Misc


Benjamin


-- 
Benjamin Ducke, M.A.
Archäoinformatik
(Archaeo-Information Science)
Institut für Ur- und Frühgeschichte
(Institute of Archaeology)
Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel
Johanna-Mestorf-Straße 2-6
D 24098 Kiel
Germany

Tel.: ++49 (0)431 880-3378 / -3379
Fax : ++49 (0)431 880-7300
www.uni-kiel.de/ufg