[GRASS-user] Linux Journal features GRASS GIS

[Hamish]

Hi,

last month or so we changed the location wizard to offer to
create a user mapset, which should gently nudge people in the
direction of not using the PERMANENT mapset for everyday work,
and exploring the concept of MAPSETS. as long as your user name
starts with a letter before "p" your one is the first offered.
even if not, you are more likely to click on your own name.

I see a funny thing where on linux wx organizes the [cancel][ok]
so the [cancel] is right under your mouse when you get to the
pop up for workspace mapset creation, but on windows the [ok]
is pre-selected.

so I think the problem is already partially addressed.

moving PERMANENT to .PERMANENT would break backwards compatibility
too much I think, and it is useful when you want to share e.g.
country coastline maps.


wrt "maps" wording I don't think there is too much confusion about
what they are.


"layer" is certainly used in two ways. Originally the vector
DB link ones were called "fields" (and still are in bits of the
vector API fns internally), but Radim decided to change that
after a long while. I can't quite remember, you'll have to dig in
the archives to see the logic in it. Anyway it was before the new
GUIs arrived so before the overlap.


wrt "display" vs "monitor" I don't think there is too much
confusion. at least new users not using 'd.mon x0' will not
have to worry about "monitors" since they will never see them.
and if they get it wrong it's still sort of the same thing
to them so they shouldn't notice the difference.
(ps, I just noticed the d.rast3d.py module description is a
bit fuzzy in what it will render to [nothing?]  [note also in
grass 5 there was a d.3d module like m.nviz.image now does])

but probably "Layer manager" -> "GRASS GIS manager" makes more sense seeing it is both the layer manager and the GUI menus, and the python console, and the output window ... the trouble
with "layers" is that people coming from other GIS software
will naturally thing in the foreign terminology that they are
used to, and that was the GUI map kind.

(btw, maybe pack the Help menu to the far right side, and make
the "layer manager" window wider/bigger by default)


Hamish