[GRASS-dev] wxGUI Help

[Michael Barton]

Helena,

For the past couple years, I've been so tied up in projects and  
administration that Martin has had to shoulder the very large load of  
GUI development and maintenance alone. My admin responsibilities  
changed this summer and it looks like I'll begin to have a little more  
time to make some contributions to GRASS again. I'm happy to help you  
with this as a way to get back into GRASS.

Thanks for doing this. As Martin says, it is pretty much a port of the  
help file I did for the TclTk GUI a couple years back. So it needs to  
be updated to match the new configurations and new tools.

I'd agree about dropping the silk icon set. That was a test and IMHO  
has been replaced by the nice, new grass2 set. I'd keep the old  
"classic" set because at least some people tell me they prefer them.  
Also, it keeps the mechanism to add new sets should someone become  
industrious and artistic.

I like the idea of showing the preset color tables. Probably they go  
best in the r.colors help page, it seems to me. Note that there is a  
new color table creation tool that works on both rasters and vectors.

I have not written a wxpython version of xganim, like I did with  
TclTk. Glynn (I think) did a standalone wxpython animator. But I  
remember some issues with it, maybe platform related, but it does  
exist. Wxpython makes it easier to craft an upgraded replacement for  
xganim in the new GUI. There are a couple of other modules that still  
need replacing (I forget what they are, but there is a list somewhere).

If we could get someone interested in adding a few features and  
regularizing others in the vector query modules, as I suggested awhile  
back (it's on the Wiki), it would be relatively easy to have quite  
sophisticated interactive vector querying. As it is now, it's doable  
but something of a pain.

Anyway, I'm glad that you are exploring the new GUI. I think it is a  
nice improvement over the TclTk one since wxpython gave us a chance to  
start from scratch. I'll be in touch over some other things soon.

Best
Michael

On Sep 4, 2009, at 12:55 AM, grass-dev-request at lists.osgeo.org wrote:

> Date: Thu, 3 Sep 2009 23:12:26 -0400
> From: Helena Mitasova <hmitaso at unity.ncsu.edu>
> Subject: [GRASS-dev] wxGUI Help
> To: GRASS developers list <grass-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
> Message-ID: <4EDA5637-5A8B-4FFE-9F4D-2D646D6F02C9 at unity.ncsu.edu>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII; delsp=yes; format=flowed
>
> I am wondering - is anybody updating the wxGUI help
> (or plans to do so in near future0?
>
> If not,  I be happy to do that (submit into grass65?)
> but it  would definitely need to be reviewed because I am not
> a GUI person and I am just learning it - which may a good thing
> for the manual development.
>
> Just a few notes -
>
> - can we skip the silk icons? There are too many icons which makes
> the help confusing
>
> - It is not clear from the help that e.g. legend is under add
> overlays: text, legend, barscale
> - add raster does not seem to be correctly described (old stuff from
> tcltk?)
>
> Also, Would it be possible to generate an image or formatted text
> showing
> the GUI tree for the raster, vector and other commands - no matter
> how logically you organize the commands there will be users with their
> own interpretations struggling to find modules. Currently, I recommend
> to type the command into Cmd and hit Enter, but one needs to know the
> command
> for that.
>
> Another question: is there an animation tool in wxpython GUI -
> something like xganim?
> animation under tcltk works but it is a little bit tricky to use
>
> thanks,
>
> Helena
>
> P.S. I haven't abandoned the color table img issue - hopefully I will
> get back to it later on (unless somebody else does it meanwhile).