[Qgis-user] My first weekend with QGIS (UI)

[John Hawkinson]

By the way, can anyone here send me a mantra for osgeo registration?
(No reply following https://www.osgeo.org/cgi-bin/ldap_create_user.py)

Nyall Dawson <nyall.dawson at gmail.com> wrote on Tue, 24 Jan 2017
at 16:39:49 +1000 in <CAB28AsikzMA9Ac4sUdpSOdczX9SGUEs1bvvKDzuJA4yyAST3gA at mail.gmail.com>:

> First off - thanks for taking the time to do this. This kind of
> feedback is invaluable to us as a project, and infinitely more useful
> than a "QGIS is frustrating!1!!" twitter post.

You're welcome! I definitely want to contribute to the project and make
it better. Only replying to the spots where you had questions.

> >   I guess that means I'd like a tooltip delay preference in QGIS (in
> >   the development branch with Qt 5 support), or I suppose a general
> >   mechanism in Qt for overriding the tooltip delay.
> 
> I'm -1 to adding options in the GUI for settings like this. It just
> makes the options dialog huge and scary. If it's an issue I'd say we
> should pick a good shorter delay value and hardcode it for the OSX
> build.

I'm not an expert on tooltips (maybe I can find some academic papers),
but my sense is that there is a fundamental conflict that is
irreconcilable: the more complicated an application, the more having
a faster tooltip is important for letting new user learn it. But the
more experienced you are in an application, the more annoying tooltips
are, and the slower you want them to be. So I suspect that getting
the tooltips fast enough to be good for new users is going to make
them atoo annoying for experienced users.

But when I get some time to sit down with the QGIS 3 / Qt 5 build (Qt
4 didn't support adjustable tooltips), I'll try to evaluate this. 

I do think worrying about making the Options dialog big and scary is
kind of unfair. QGIS already has a *lot* of options, one more isn't
going to break the bank. And if this was a real concern, you could
throw it under Advanced.

Although that's a little counterproductive since the entire point of
the adjustment would be to cater to new users. Although I suppose
the default could be new-user-speed and only advanced users could
slwo it down.

> > * The "Step up" and "Step down" functions (e.g. up/down arrows for
> >   adjusting the point size of fonts or width of strokes/outlines,
> >   etc.) are sometimes scaled inadequately.
> 
> This annoys me too - can you let me know specifics and I'll address
> them. I try to fix each one as I find it, but often forget...

I think Nathan misunderstood me, since he referenced widget padding.
I didn't mean the visual appearance (scale) of the arrow widgets,
I meant the default quantum of adjustment.

Specifically if I have text in as "10 point" and I switch the
adjustment to map units, "10 map unit" text is unreadably small.
In this particular test, which is the alaska.shp from the sample
dataset, it shows at scale 1:17,433,906 and magnification 100%.
To get the text readable, it has to be 10,000 map units. 

I would have to click the up arrow tens of thousands of time to get to
a point where it is visible. I'm not sure what the right solution here
is....maybe the arrows for map units should go at logarithmic scales?

Also, is something wrong with this shapefile that it shows up at
such a huge scale factor? It's much larger (17 million) than the biggest
scale factor in the scale factor dropdown (1 million).

> > * The default font is Helvetica, which is fine, but for some reason
> >   QGIS won't show me any subfaces of Helvetica by default. If I switch
> >   to another font and then switch back to Helvetica, then I am given
> >   the proper face choices (Light, Regular, Oblique, &c.). Something's
> >   wrong with the font selection defaults (perhaps in Qt?)
> 
> I can't reproduce this - it may be an OSX specific issue. Can you
> outline exact steps to reproduce?

It probably is OSX-specific.
Trivial to reproduce, and seems to happen in ~all cases, but here's one:
New Project; Add Vector Layer: airports.shp; Layer styling: Labelling;
Show labels for this layer; Label with NAME.

The font shown is Helvatica, but the face dropdown is empty.  Switch
to Helvetica Neue, the dropdown is populated.  Switch back to
Helvetica, it's populated (and the defauilt is Light Oblique).

> > . Cmd-shift-V does something very different in the Print Composer --
> >   Paste in Place instead of Add Vector Layer. I can kind of see why
> >   this might be happening, but the idea of having totally different
> >   keybindings in differnt windows of the same application seems pretty
> >   novel. And novelty in UI design results in confusion more often than
> >   not.
> 
> In this case I'd rather leave the composer shortcut and change the
> main app shortcut. Ctrl+Shift+V is a common shortcut used across many
> apps for paste in place.

I agree it's common for Paste-In-Place. But I also suspect more QGIS
users use it for Add Vector Layer. Also this is not a huge deal -- I think
it is an example of novelty and that novelty breeds confusion, but I don't
know that this particular case is actually all that confusing. *shrug*

> > * Why does QGIS use Transparency sliders instead of Opacity sliders?
> >   Isn't Opacity much more common in graphics software?
> 
> Actually we mix and match ;) Yay for consistency!

Well, then that's a great reason to make them all consistent and use
Opacity! (unless there's strong precedent for Transparency in mapping
apps).

> > * How come the 2.5 D Renderer doesn’t show up in my layer styling
> >   Symbology dropdown? Is it not supported under OS X?
> 
> It's a layer renderer, not a symbol layer style. You should see it
> listed along with categorised/graduated renderers.

Eh? Layer Styling: Symbology gives me No Symbols, Single Symbol,
Categorized, Graduated, Rule-Based, Point displacement, and Heatmap. Are
you saying it should be in htere next to Categorized nand Graduated? It's not.

> 2. while we have developers who use OSX, a lot of their focus is on
> packaging and distributing for OSX. I don't think there's anyone
> actively working on OSX specific UI issues or bugs.

Understood.

I'm not really a GUI developer, but I can make some effort at this.

--jhawk at mit.edu
  John Hawkinson