To Jody,
I spent some time yesterday playing with udig 0.4 on windows. The
following is a list of critiques and wishes. The install was much nicer
than 0.2 (unzip and go) and the DataStore "count" operation is a neat
addition.
First the help. It is much improved since 0.2. The first page is still a
"using the eclipse help system" which will hopefully be a "welcome to
udig" in the future. The basic tutorial/editors and views page could use
some examples when discussing prespecive/view/editors (some examples
were given elsewhere). I still do not fully know what a prespective is
(I do not use eclipse). I think it just allows you to "save" a layout of
windows (views). Also it may be good to hid eclipsisms from users in the
final docs: they may not need to know the difference between views and
editors (just call them windows).
In the project explorer, the tree closes when you delete a map (annoying
since I wanted to delete 5 of them).
On the toolbar: the "display all data" tooltip is not descriptive.
Perhaps zoom to full extent, full zoom or reset zoom would be better.
Also the edit mode button has no tooltip.
When I selected a polygon on a map, it disapeared. The map re-drew after
the selection without the polygon.
The zoom in behaviour is 'different'. It is not bad, but not what most
people who have used jump/arcview would expect (I think I have seen a
CAD behave like that).
The add shapefile wizard "use memory mapped buffer" is not very user
friendly. If this option is needed, perhaps a checkbox with "keep
contents in memory" (or whatever it does) would be better. Also the
"next" button in the wizard was greyed out here (can it just be replaced
by the finish button). The browse button is a nice improvement.
I got quite a few error dialogs with "errors see log for details". The
logs are attached.
1.log - caused by clicking on a shapefile layer in the Layers view. This
error did not occur at first, but once it happened clicking here always
threw an error.
2.log - same thing, clicking on a wms layer.
3.log - caused by trying to add a single wms layer to a new map (is this
not yet implemented: adding all wms layers works)
4.log - caused by adding a shapefile (with .prj) to the registry. The
problem here is the wkt parsing (UTM which should not suffer from esri
and us using different names for things). This error may have been
caused by one of Martin's recent changes. I fixed a similar error last
night in projected CS, but this appears to be a bit different. Hopefully
the referencing package will *soon* replace this code. I will take
another look at this one tonight.
Now for some wishes that I hope are on your todo list. The ability to
change styles for layers, re-arrange layer order and view a datastore's
attribute table data would be nice. Also an "identify" button (a
dockable identify window might be good). Also, (if you have the time) an
operations api with a view in udig to access all the cool tools we can
write (ok, maybe udig 2.0).
Hope the above are useful. Remember, I critisize because I care.
Rueben
