[Qgis-developer] Polishing QGIS

Marco Hugentobler marco.hugentobler at sourcepole.ch
Mon Sep 26 03:00:05 EDT 2011


Hi Tim

> 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

The proposal to work in small teams sounds good to me. That way, people can 
really work continuously on one topic.
For me, a 'geometry redesign working group' would be an interesting topic.

One thing to consider already during the developer meeting is a timeline that 
includes the time after the meeting. In a common situation, people don't 
easily find the time to finish what they begun during the meeting. Don't know 
how that can be avoided.

Regards,
Marco

Am Samstag, 24. September 2011, 13.39:57 schrieb 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
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Qgis-developer mailing list
> > Qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org
> > http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-developer


-- 
Dr. Marco Hugentobler
Sourcepole -  Linux & Open Source Solutions
Churerstrasse 22, CH-8808 Pfäffikon SZ, Switzerland
marco.hugentobler at sourcepole.ch http://www.sourcepole.ch
Technical Advisor QGIS Project Steering Committee


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