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Re: [udig-devel] Testing for RC9 (plus image pyramid plans)
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Hi all,
I would like just to add a couple issues to Adrian's feedback, which arises
from my experience working on editting tools lately
1) Table view.
Table view has become a table editor. Thus it would be very useful to:
a) being able to open more than one view (like the "new console view" option
in eclipse's console view)
b) stick a view to a layer, so one is able of changing the current layer
without loosing the currently being editted attribute set
c) some way to "update batch" a given attribute for the selected features.
Like for setting the street_code to the selected street segments.
2) Toolbar and menus
It is not completely evident what the tool grouping criteria is on the
toolbars. Even more, there are a lot of tool that have a button but lack a
menu entry. I guess tool buttons should be a subset of the ones available
through the menus.
There are two toolbars, and both have navigation, information and edition
tools mixed.
I would suggest the following grouping per toolbar:
* navigation
- back
- forward
- redraw
- stop
- full extent
- zoom+
- zoom-
- zoom
- pan
- zoom to selection
* information
- bbox selection
- info
* editting
- commit
- rollback
- feature edition (edit, add vertex, etc)
- feature creation (line, point, polygon, rectangle, etc)
- edit tools (trim, clip, split, etc)
3) Edition control
Adrian spoke about being able to draw vertical/horizontal lines while creating
a geometry. I think the topic goes beyond to the point that, while editing
geometries, it is necessary to combine different techniques, thus the
selection of a feature creation/modification tool should set a "mode", in
order that other context sensitive "modifiers" can be used.
Examples:
- being editing a line and set an "ortho" mode which only allows horizontal
and vertical lines, or even enabling the drawing of line segments orthogonal
to another one from another feature.
- being editing a line and set the edition mode temporarily parallell to
another, existing one.
- while adding vertices to a line, draw an arc and then continue
adding straight segments.
of course there are much more possible examples. AutoCAD is the most feature
rich app I know on this regard.
4) Transaction handling
The commit buttong is always enabled, even if there are no open transaction.
Same for rollback. It could be usefull to have a transaction log view, so one
could visualize what's pending.
5) Enabling selection on multiple layers.
This one seems like a key requirement in order to leverage the current
platform interactions to be reused on editting tools and geoprocessing
operations. Though implementation details are a topic for another thread, I
guess we should agree that multiple layers with a selection set are needed.
Let's discuss the how later. So far, commenting out the else clause with
layer.setFiler(Filter.ALL) in MapImpl makes the trick by now (except clear
selection starts to missbehave a little)
That said, I think we're really in the process of making udig a great GIS
editor.
regards,
Gabriel
On Saturday 03 February 2007 19:08, Adrian Custer wrote:
> Hey all,
>
>
> RC9 unofficial runs well on this GNU install (linux/X/Gnome on intel
> i386 centrino). Jesse (and all the others), it looks like you have done
> very good work, thanks.
>
> Below are quick thoughts to consider as you see fit; I'm sure you know
> about most of these and some are long term issues so this is just a
> brainstorm:
>
> (for uDig)
>
> Where's the measurement tool?
>
> Why does the zoom tool look like such garbage (big cross with a
> non-descript, wanna be magnifying glass below)? Ibid for the
> other tools (info tool is half black, half white, all junky).
>
> The map graphics obviously need work:
> 1) the grid style info makes no sense: x,y relative to
> what? what kind of width? A user probably wants the grid
> on degree lines or every xkms vertically and
> horizontally. For non mercator projections, does the
> 'grid' stay orthogonal or is it a real map grid?
>
> 2) the legend shows the visible layers also shown in the
> "layers' view. Perhaps, for clarity, the map graphics
> layers should have a different look in the layers view
> so that this parallism is more 'natural'. Could the map
> graphics be shown on a slightly grey background to
> distinguish 'map' layers from 'graphic' layers?
>
> 2.2) the legend view takes the size of the layers in the
> map but only shows the visible layers so it's much too
> big with a blank empty spot below when they are layers
> in the layer view that are not being displayed.
>
> 2.3) the legend view should not zoom with the map zoom
> but stay put (and it will not change with that
> operation). Ibid with a pan operation.
>
> 2.4) the legend view should disappear on mouse over with
> an editing tool (or it is visually in the way even if it
> doesn't physically interfere with the edit).
>
> Making a new layer to serve as a bounding box for zoom requires
> that the edit tool allow us to (1) draw vertical and horizontal
> lines and (2) match up the end point with the start point. For
> the latter, the first three points of a rectangle can be built
> with a way to draw only horizontal and vertical lines, however
> the fourth point needs to be placed in reference to the first
> point. The 'shift-' or 'ctrl-' key should help us draw
> vert/horizontal lines. Letting users close the rectangle is
> harder since they have to find the place to click exactly
> opposite the original click: perhaps the 'polygon' tool should
> show the closing segment, perhaps the 'ctrl' key should act like
> a 'snap to grid' tool based on a grid built from the original
> point (so a user will easily see the point exactly matched with
> the original), or ...?
>
>
> Selection in the table view: it's getting better, cool!
>
> 'ctrl-' or 'shift-' + 'mouse drag' should add to the
> selection rather than having all selections replace the
> existing set.
>
> Select two layers in the layers view then, drag mouse on
> the screen: leads to selection only of the features in
> the topmost layer. The user needs some feedback that
> uDig is doing something weird, maybe just a warning in
> the status bar "Warning: multiple layers with different
> attributes selected, selection will act only of top
> layer features". A user should see relatively quickly
> what has happened but, because they might expect
> something different, uDig should have a standard way to
> give feedback (and a pop up dialog seems heavy).
> Similarly, if multiple selected layers have the same
> attribute set, they can be displayed in the same table.
>
>
>
> (for uDig and Geotools/Simone)
>
> uDig now has a 'web catalog' view that gives a list of WMS and WFS
> sources! VERY COOL. It's what new users want and works very nicely so
> congrats on the hard work.
>
> Obviously, this still needs to be improved. For example, panning half a
> screen over current discards the currently visible tile right away and
> requests a whole new tile. uDig should keep the 'tile' of the existing
> background image and keep showing it until the new request has been
> fulfilled.
>
> However, it seems like Simone can lead us to bigger and better things.
> Simone, when uDig eventually integrates your work, will it be possible
> to make a set of structured requests of the WMS to build a temporary
> image pyramid to improve user responsiveness. A user has at most
> 2000x2000 pixels on their screen. The base request should be for
> whatever area of interest (extent and scale) the map has when the user
> adds the layer to the map (or makes it visible). However, once that
> request is fulfilled, couldn't uDig start building an image pyramid on
> the fly so that whatever the user does next (pan, zoom) uDig would have
> the data. We can see immediately that there are a whole slew of issues
> that arise in designing such a background pyramid building. Is this
> something some of you have been pondering?
>
>
> Thanks again for all the work on RC9,
> --adrian
>
> _______________________________________________
> User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig)
> http://udig.refractions.net
> http://lists.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/udig-devel
--
Gabriel Roldán (groldan@xxxxxxxx)
Axios Engineering (http://www.axios.es)
Tel. +34 944 41 63 84
Fax. +34 944 41 64 90
