[Qgis-developer] Polishing QGIS

[Tim Sutton]

Hi Paolo

On Sat, Sep 24, 2011 at 10:41 AM, Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it> wrote:
> Hi all.
> Just finished (yet another) course, this time in Spain. Went well,
> people looked very positive about it. Crashes are less and less frequent
> over the course of the years, even using the dev packages.
> Now that many core issues are solved, cosmetic issues are more apparent:
> we suffer from duplications and inconsistencies. I have opened several
> tickets. I know it is a boring and unexciting job, but sooner or later
> we have to do it.
> Anyone has plans to work on this?

In my mind this will be very much the mission of 2.0 - as well as
making all the internals clutter free and consistent, we must work to
make the ui the same. I hope to spend the upcoming hackfest working to
build more re-usable widgets (as we have discussed and planned in
Lisbon). Building a good widget library I believe will be a key step
towards achieving this consistency and will have the benefit on
centralising fixes that then propogate themselves to all parts of the
UI that use that widget, The projection selector widget is a really
good example of the mileage we can get from this approach - it is used
in various parts of the ui and in many plugins.

There are some key things I think need to be done:

- adopt an activity based interface: e.g. the print composer,
georeferencing tool and other parts of the app that also implement a
main window ui are all kinds of wrong. There should only be one main
window and set of menus in any application, so we need to implement
the appropriate changes such that the menus etc update according to
the context of the work (activity) you are doing. In the courses I
give, people generally lose the composer window and it is not uncommon
to see them with ten instances of composers as they lose it and create
new ones in succession.

- Implementing the symbology ui better. We need some kind of tree
interface (we discussed this at the hackfest in Lisbon in some
detail). New symbology is very confusing when you have symbols
composed of symbols that are themselves composed of symbols. Managing
that causes many levels of windows to be spawned and novice users
(advanced users too I guess) can quickly lose track of where they are.

- We need to look at how simple interactions work and streamline them.
For example, label rotation is a nice new feature but its almost
impossible to get the alignment you want interactively.

- We need to identify parts of the user interface that are 'advanced'
and hide them away from casual users.

- We need to apply sensible defaults and work towards the element of
least surprise.

- We should start thinking about implementing a telemetry layer in
QGIS - with ~200 000 possible users out there, if even just 10% of
users allow us to collect telemetry data it will be a goldmine of
information (it will make a nice GSOC project). Know where users
click, how often, which dialogs they spend most time in, etc etc can
prove invaluable in targeting places that need improvement most.

I could keep on going all day about all the other things we need to
do. This hackfest I was thinking it would be nice to try to do the
planning and meeting stuff before the time as much as possible (via
wiki / mailing list) so we can come prepared in small teams ready to
reaaly focus on working. I enjoyed Lisbon very much but I felt we
spent too much time meeting and discussing stuff and not enough hands
on time so it would be great to address that. Anybody coming who is
interested in forming part of a GUI overhaul team lets get the ball
rolling and put our plans in place here

http://www.qgis.org/wiki/Version2GuiRevision  (just a place holder
page for now  - we can flesh it out in the run up to Zurich).


Regards

Tim

> Thanks.
> --
> Paolo Cavallini: http://www.faunalia.it/pc
>
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>



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