[Qgis-developer] Re: Working on Symbology Improvement for the GSOC

[aruntheguy at gmail.com]

I think I just had a "Eye-opener" moment. While I have been thinking about
reducing the modal dialogs and decoupling things, I think somewhere along
the line I forgot almost entirely about the usability. After reading the
above feedback, I realize, Symbology suite will have to provide tools that
would allow live experimentation and editing. It should be something like
the toolbar of a graphics editor.

Nathan, the link was really an eye opener.


On Sun, Apr 1, 2012 at 7:06 AM, Nathan Woodrow <madmanwoo at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> I'm going to be a -1 one on this proposal.  I, like Antia, do a lot of
> experimenting in the style dialog and I don't like the idea of having to go
> somewhere else to define my custom symbols/or use them.
>

I think I will stick with the decoupling, but
  - make the editing affair a Dockable Widget, that would render the
changes on-the-fly or on request in the main canvas itself.
  - Have icons in the dock to perform actions like symbols editing
activities and symbol management (say a import button to add the remote
symbol repository)
  - Effectively utilize the single clicks, double clicks and the
Right-click context menus on the symbols in legend to perform legend item
specific tasks rather than to layer properties. Layer properties can be
called by double-clicking on the layer itself anyway.

So its about two things, one a whole new dockable widget that would allow
all the customization things like creating symbols, and the second is
adding power to the legend to apply any symbol at any state, or even change
the renderer for the entire layer.


>
>> + Create a new symbol designer, that can be summoned up from Menu rather
>> than from the properties
>>
>
> -1. If we have to go down the route of have a split designer it must be
> easily accessible from the same place that you would pick the symbols.
>  Making the user exit out of the properties dialog to define a new symbol
> would be bad.
>
>

Now that the entire symbology editing is brought out as a dock which will
let you perform all the editing, saving of symbols live on your map, I
think going somewhere just once to summon that dock won't be much of a
turn-off :)


-- 
Regards
Arunmozhi
Twitter: @tecoholic
Website: http://arunmozhi.in
IRC Nick: teco
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.osgeo.org/pipermail/qgis-developer/attachments/20120401/66d68e5f/attachment.html