[GRASS-dev] Making start of GRASS GIS easier for newcomers

[Michael Barton]

To make this more compact, there is still extraneous information not needed below the location and mapset windows. Also, error messages should be in popup error windows, not displayed on the main dialog.

Michael
______________________________
C. Michael Barton
Director, Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity
Professor of Anthropology, School of Human Evolution & Social Change
Head, Graduate Faculty in Complex Adaptive Systems Science
Arizona State University
Tempe, AZ  85287-2402
USA

voice:  480-965-6262 (SHESC), 480-965-8130/727-9746 (CSDC)
fax:          480-965-7671(SHESC), 480-727-0709 (CSDC)
www:  http://csdc.asu.edu, http://shesc.asu.edu
http://www.public.asu.edu/~cmbarton

On Feb 2, 2015, at 12:01 PM, Vaclav Petras <wenzeslaus at gmail.com<mailto:wenzeslaus at gmail.com>> wrote:

More improvements for startup window in r64405.

Most notably you don't get error message when starting GRASS for the first time without a rc file. After clicking OK, you would get a browse window. Now you just get a warning text in the middle of the window and it is up to you to read it and press the button. In my opinion, much less annoying behavior.

The descriptions are now in gray. This is system color, so it should work with different themes. (This is not true for the things like warning text or grayed out Mapsets)

I changed the descriptions a little bit but it needs more care. Anybody can change it now but perhaps we should try to discuss them without diverging to how to do startup procedure differently. Also there is more strings, some messages, they might need some revision too. E.g. should there be numbers in the box titles? And what about the error messages?

The windows issues are just partially fixed. It seems that wxPython is not determining the wrapping properly. The widgets have the same boundaries in widget inspector on MS Windows and on Linux. Just the text is wrapped differently.

The vertical size is bigger then it was before (you can compare at an image posted earlier [2]). It will get smaller by using smaller banner image. However, longer descriptions and the error/warning text are making it bigger. Now the behavior of error/warning text is that it does not occupy any space unless something is shown. Hopefully it will work on all platforms (seems to work well on Linux and MS Windows). In theory, the window could be re-sized by user to be smaller (if screen is small) but I'm not able to make Location and Mapset lists to allow it. If I set minimal size, then they actually use it from the beginning and I get unnecessary small lists. We could get some vertical space by growing wider but then the Location and Mapset lists are unnecessary wide.

Vaclav

[1] http://trac.osgeo.org/grass/changeset/64405
[2] http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/grass-dev/attachments/20150121/62aad5af/attachment-0001.png http://osgeo-org.1560.x6.nabble.com/attachment/5183019/1/startup_with_explanations.png
<startup_warning.png>

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