[Qgis-developer] Re: ideas for developpers (The Plugins menu)

[Martin Dobias]

On Fri, May 23, 2008 at 5:59 AM, Tim Sutton <tim at linfiniti.com> wrote:
>>
>> Other possibility would be to use tree view that would include the
>> categories instead of a combo box...
>
> Yes I thought of that too but I think a tree will look more cluttered and I
> was going for a google 'search dont sort' approach. I'm planning to revise
> the projection selector and grass toolbox to follow a similar paradigm.

What I actually mean is that the approach "search, don't sort" is
useful in some cases, while at some places might be contraproductive.
I don't know how people usually use e.g. grass toolbox, but some tasks
like "i'd like to see all vector layer exporting tools" is hard to
achieve with plain search capabilities and categorizing in a tree
works better.


>> 2. the selection background is maybe too colorful :-)
>
> The colour comes from your desktop settings for window background. I'm going
> to commit a change to make the gradient less drastic...see if its any better
> for you then....

Looks great now ;-)
One more thing I note is that plugins are ordered in a rather random way...


>> It should be quite easy to add support of categories for python
>> plugins. As you could see recently on mailing list, there are some
>> plans on the way to improve reporting metadata information for python
>> plugins (e.g. dependencies) so support for categories can be added
>> too.
>>
>
> I saw the messages but when the talk got too pythony (is that a word?)  I

I think "pythoninc" is the correct word :)

> started  getting cross eyed :-P I think whatever changes you guys plan we
> should
>
> a) really think about if this is needed pre 1.0
> b) try to keep the complexity as low as possible

I do all the changes with respect to backward compatibility. I'm
trying to get the python support rock solid for 1.0 so that plugin
developers won't have any obstacles to create plugins. Second
objective is to improve the user experience with plugins. Developers
should be able to specify plugin dependencies, users should be able to
manage the plugins more easily (i.e. support uninstalling and
upgrading) - let's see where we manage to do.

Martin