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Re: [udig-devel] action tools on dropdown together with modal tools
Hi Andrea;

I am sorry it seems I am coming across wrong. I am not sure what the best approach is - it was our idea to isolate actions into views however that may not be a good idea? It sounds like you do not think it is ...

If you would like to explore adding actions to the drop down categories available on the toolbar I would like to make sure what we are doing makes sense to users at the end of the day.

Right now the current tool is shown as selected in the toolbar; and the category changes its icon to make that tool visible so the user can see it is selected). I would like to consider some solution that would help ...

Here is another thought with no idea if it can be implemented or if it would help you.
What if we had a group of icons on the toolbar that would change depending on the current category?

Something like:

| normal actions done via eclipse | action tools | tool categories | actions for the current tool category |

Would that help?

jody

On Thu, Nov 27, 2008 at 7:08 PM, andrea antonello <andrea.antonello@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Hi Jody,
your answers are very bound to your way of working.
As you know we always try to "force" our customers to stay on standard
Udig with various extentions.
That helps Udig a lot in my opinion.
So we try to never use just parts of udig, but try to push udig to
grow as a general purpose tool. That is the reason why I try to not
introduce new perspectives if not really necessary, which in most of
my cases is not necessary.

[...]
>> That is not feasible for me, since the action tool I have, is the one
>> that should open the view.
>>
>
> You should have your own perspective here; that includes both the view - and
> enables / disables the action sets that control what tools appear in the top
> toolbar.
> If the action tool actually opens the view then I am a bit confused as to
> why it is a tool? Is it like the info tool in that a a query is made and a
> view used to show the answer? Nope that does not make sense...

The fact is that the toolbars are a bit crowded and I wanted to have
small logically connected bars.
In my case the geonotes creation tool and the selection tools are in
the tools bar. The open geonotes fieldbook view is in the bar with all
the navigation things. I would prefer top have a small bar with all of
them together, as I did for the gps tools. It works out much better
for users, else they always have to search around.

> Still if this is being a problem maybe we need a new toolbar construct that
> has toggle buttons for various views of interesting tools... does your
> action just open the view? Does it close it as well? Perhaps you could
> provide more information?

It just opens the view, I could also make it toggle and close, but
that doesn't change much the thing.
I attach a screenshot just to have an idea of what I am talking about.

Thanks for the links below, I will read through them.

Andrea


>>> - explore the use of the "palette" tool that the Draw2d crowd put
>>> together.
>>> Near as I can tell it is a custom SWT control that has a similar model to
>>> what we put together. If we can switch to that it will give Jesse less
>>> code
>>> to maintain.
>>>
>>
>> What do you mean with the palette tool of draw2d?
>>
>
> It is a control - similar in spirit to what we made that was origionally
> done for the Graphical Editing Framework projects. It was not ready when we
> made uDig 1.0 but we should be able to switch over to it and reduce our
> codebase.
> -
> http://help.eclipse.org/stable/topic/org.eclipse.gef.doc.isv/guide/guide.html#ToolPalette
>
> There is also the nebula project that is making useful custom widgets in
> this direction.
>
> Here is an example use:
> -
> http://help.eclipse.org/help32/index.jsp?topic=/org.eclipse.ve.doc/topics/cve_palette.html
>
> Here are some docs:
> - http://www.eclipse.org/nebula/
> -
> http://www.eclipse.org/projects/project_summary.php?projectid=technology.nebula
>
> It has the same concepts as we do; modal tools and fire and forget action
> kind of tools. It arranges thes things into shelves of functionality and has
> a couple interesting presentations of the same data structure - depending on
> horizontal / virticle orientation and if labels are displayed.
>
>
>> Andrea
>>
>>
>>>
>>> Jody
>>>
>>> On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 3:18 AM, andrea antonello
>>> <andrea.antonello@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> I have a set of tools that logically should be in the same place.
>>>> 2 of them are modal and one is action.
>>>> If I put them on the toolbar through the extention point option:
>>>> _onToolbar_ = true,
>>>> and with the same category, 2 of them are together in a dropdown , and
>>>> the action is all alone in another toolbar.
>>>>
>>>> Is there a way to get them together or do I have to delegate an
>>>> ActionSet to do that?
>>>>
>>>> Andrea
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig)
>>>> http://udig.refractions.net
>>>> http://lists.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/udig-devel
>>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig)
>>> http://udig.refractions.net
>>> http://lists.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/udig-devel
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig)
>> http://udig.refractions.net
>> http://lists.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/udig-devel
>>
>
> _______________________________________________
> User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig)
> http://udig.refractions.net
> http://lists.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/udig-devel
>

_______________________________________________
User-friendly Desktop Internet GIS (uDig)
http://udig.refractions.net
http://lists.refractions.net/mailman/listinfo/udig-devel


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