[Qgis-developer] User profiles

[Alister Hood]

Hi guys,

> Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2012 18:43:50 +0200
> From: Martin Dobias <wonder.sk at gmail.com>
> To: Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it>
> Cc: qgis-developer <qgis-developer at lists.osgeo.org>
> Subject: Re: [Qgis-developer] User profiles
> Message-ID:
>         <CAC2XbFfjRANmX52NNoW7KHYPO5uG0H_FhV=P+N70p1yWqnHA2A at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
> 
> Hi Paolo
> 
> On Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 2:56 PM, Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it> wrote:
> > Hi all.
> > The discussion of this evening brought a nice idea: since we have many
> > different types of users, whi not having a "first usage wizard" that
> > simply asks the user which profile (s)he prefers, and then starts QGIS
> > with only the needed menus and buttons activated? The profiles can be
> > easily produced via the customization menu, so this seems trivial to
> > implement, and can greatly help first-time users and special interest
> > groups.
> > Of course we have to have a prominent menu to re-run the wizard, and
> > change the choice.
> > Opinions?
> 
> I am just afraid that with such profiles the users may forget after a
> while they have chosen a "first-time user" profile that disables a lot
> of functionality and then users will ask/complain about missing
> features...?

Yes, I can see why you might want to offer some default "profiles" to control which toolbars and panels are visible, but I don't think it is a good idea to use the customisation feature to hide any functionality.

> btw. Personally I'm quite intimidated by the amount of toolbars and
> icons that QGIS shows by default (i.e. first run). I think if we could
> cut that down to a one line of icons, that will be a good start.

Me too.  I'm more of an enthusiast than a frequent user, but I imagine the features most users would need to use frequently are on the "navigation", "digitizing" and "attributes" toolbars, so you would probably get away with showing only these by default.

I'm not too sure about the panels - maybe just "layers"?  Or "layers" and "overview"?

I think there might be a ticket with a discussion of this, too... or maybe there was just a previous discussion on the mailing list.


Alister