[Qgis-developer] Getting some newbie views

[Tim Sutton]

Hi Barry & Crew

Well done on your workshop!


On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 11:04 +0000, Barry Rowlingson wrote:

>  * Toolbar icons were a bit difficult for them. Possibly because it's
> easier during a workshop to say 'click on Layers... New Vector Layer'
> than 'the new vector layer icon is that one there with the green
> lines...'. With the Grass plugin icons it's a bit worse... Possible
> solution would be to start qgis with no toolbars and have everything
> from menus. Also, the toolbars can get so cluttered that common tools
> aren't visible, and newbies don't know where to look. I ran around the
> class a bit dragging the view/zoom toolbar to the right edge. Many
> users had no experience configuring a flexible gui like this.


There are two issues here:

1) the toolbars arent laid out by default because they are defined
programmatically instead of designer. In a future version I will move
them into designer and it should fix that.

2) The icons: Robert Szczepanek is busy making a new great looking
cohesive set of icons that will hopefully give QGIS a more consistent
look and feel. That can only happen post 1.0 though since we are gui
frozen. However even the nicest set of icons in the world wont remove
the need for people to get familiar with them


> 
>  * Why is the layer list called the 'legend'? Yes, I know it displays
> the legend styles for the renderer, but it's more often used for
> arranging layers and setting properties. The legend popup menu has a
> lot of infrequently-used items - mainly related to the layer grouping
> - that add to the clutter and make it hard for beginners to find the
> one or two things that might want. Maybe the Save and Save Selection
> items could move to the Layer menu. And what are 'File Groups' all
> about?

All useful comments and things we can address post 1.0. File groups let
group a bunch of e.g. raster layers into a 'folder' in the legend so
they can be treated as one legend item - e.g. to switch many layers
visibility on/off in one click.



> 
>  * "Symbology"? I think ologies put people off. Why not 'Appearance'?
> I'm pretty sure that newbies would have trouble figuring this out if
> it wasn't the first tab in the dialog!

Sure we could could change this - it just reflects the internal
terminology of singlesymbolrenderer etc...


> 
> On the plus side, very few crashes, and this was 28 people running
> Qgis 1.0 preview 2 from 6 Windows 2003 Terminal Server machines. They
> all got some maps loaded, and most managed Jason's GRASS overlay
> exercise. It got a bit slow at one point, but that might have been
> another class running in the other lab using the same servers, or
> possibly just the size of the raster data - I'm making a new rule that
> says demo raster data for workshops cant be more than 512x512! We did
> cram a lot into half a day.


Sounds good!



> 
>  Quite a few people ticked our feedback forms for more Qgis workshops,
> and we plugged Gary's book as much as possible! 10% commission please
> Gary!
> 


Hopefully that will see Gary's work shoot up the best seller list next
to Dan Brown & co....


Regards

Tim

> Barry
> _______________________________________________
> Qgis-developer mailing list
> Qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
> http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer

-- 
Tim Sutton - QGIS Project Steering Committee Member (Release  Manager)
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