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

[Vaclav Petras]

On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 12:16 PM, Michael Barton <Michael.Barton at asu.edu>
wrote:

> For this release, we need to focus on just tweaking the current startup
> screen and doing better graphics for the splash. The other topic is a much
> bigger issue.
>

Not everybody considers my suggestion as useful-enough change and there is
the hard freeze (although the functionality changes are almost zero). As a
result, I don't plan to commit it to release branch now. However, I
consider it as a great improvement which I definitively want to use and I
think it is very beneficial for beginners, so I will commit that to trunk
when I get to it. Then we can continue in the other improvements.

To the other things. I also consider data in different projections as much
bigger issue. GRASS has all the tools as described and also implemented by
Markus Metz but it is too much for beginners. We should definitively make
it more accessible (but it is also interesting business opportunity :-).

I still don't understand what the user could in the dummy/LL/XY/demo
location besides looking to menus and being confused from wrongly imported
data or no imported data at all because of projection issues.

Michael suggests to replace startup by some wizard and this is what QGIS is
doing. So, is putting everything to wizard better then the window +
optional wizard? We can go that way but note the difference between QGIS
and GRASS, when QGIS is running the wizard, the app is already there,
wizard is just an additional window. For GRASS, it would the window you get
which might be strange. Even stranger if the window would be just some
small one with "Will start in location xxx" and "Change" and "Continue"
buttons.

It would be also useful to analyze why the thing which is done on MS
Windows by the standalone installer is not enough. There should be a demo
location already and set as last used. Also NC SPM can be downloaded,
should it be checked by default?

Does somebody has a opinion on using "Location", "GRASS Location", or
"GRASS location" consistently? You can see also "LOCATION" here and there
in GRASS but I wouldn't go that way.
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