[GRASS-dev] Re: GRASS-dev] some impressions on the wx interface

Michael Barton michael.barton at asu.edu
Fri Sep 11 11:43:11 EDT 2009


Thanks for the thoughtful review and summary Carlos.

Michael

On Sep 11, 2009, at 8:02 AM, grass-dev-request at lists.osgeo.org wrote:

> Date: Fri, 11 Sep 2009 12:01:51 -0300
> From: Carlos Grohmann <carlos.grohmann at gmail.com>
> Subject: [GRASS-dev] some impressions on the wx interface
> To: grass-dev <grass-dev at lists.osgeo.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <bd07447b0909110801x5987a7e0jea45d6441253e943 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
>
> Dear devs,
>
> Recently we had a workshop on SAGA+GRASS+R at the Geomorphometry2009
> conference (www.geomorphometry.org). Before the workshop I was using
> the old tcl/tk interface (pretty much because of laziness, I'm used to
> it), but during the workshop most students were using Windows, so the
> WX interface was the default. Besides some bugs with the Windows
> version of GRASS, it went well. Some of the issues I observed during
> the workshop follow, so we can discuss ways to improve GRASS.
>
> One thing is that the WX interface doesn't open a terminal (at least
> in Windows), so if one is thinking about running GRASS+R, with GRASS
> on top of R, there is no way. Or is there?
>
> I noticed that the students were using most the "load map layers into
> workspace" icon, instead of "add raster" or "add vector". I don't know
> if this is because "load maps" is more to the left of the toolbar, and
> if you read from left to right, you see it before the others. I think
> that it would be better if the three "workspace" icons were at the far
> right of the toolbar. Also I would put the "add raster" and "add
> vector" icons  with a different image, to highlight them from the
> others.
>
> In the Map Display, the "overlay" icon doesn't really mean much, I
> think that a different image would help, or even three buttons, one
> for legend, one for north arrow and on for text.
>
> In GIS manager, it looks to me that the "maps for each display" and
> "command output" are tabs, right? using a wx.notebook? in this case, I
> have to say that they don't look like tabs, and this always got me a
> little confused. If they had a real tab-like appearance, it would be
> better to understand the way the GUI works, because anyone that's new
> to the interface would know that there are two tabs with different
> contents. Also it would be very nice if instead of "maps for each
> display", we had "maps for display 1", "maps for display 2", etc.
>
> Also, using the mouse scroll wheel to navigate between tabs, IMO, is a
> must-have. That includes all tabs, the display tabs in gism and the
> options tabs in the commands dialogs. I also noticed that one can
> "close" tabs in the command dialog. why? the arrows to scroll to tabs
> that may not be visible is OK (although I would prefer to have all the
> tabs shown, even if that meant two rows of tabs), but closing tabs
> shouldn't be an option. Maybe we can save some space using regular
> "square" tabs instead of the tabs with that triangular ending.
>
> The dialog name for r.shaded.relief is "raded.relief". Didn't check
> other dialogs.
>
> And I noticed that I can't change the HTML browser (Ubuntu 9.04,
> latest GRASS SVN). It always call Konqueror. I tried changing
> GRASS_HTML_BROWSER to firefox or chromium-browser, but unsuccessfully.
>
> that's it for now. I'll use only the WX interface now, so I might come
> back with more feedback soon.
>
> cheers
>
> Carlos



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