Re: [anjuta-devel] Project manager UI suggestions

[Johannes Schmid <jhs jsschmid de>]

Hi!

> Perhaps, I can remove the Add module dialog and add it somewhere in the 
> target properties dialog. Or have only one Add libraries dialog which is 
> displaying the current Add module dialog if a target is selected and the 
> current Add package dialog in other cases. You can still get the Add 
> package dialog from the Add module dialog.

I like the idea of the "Add libraries" dialog. Sounds much more like
that task the user wants to achieve.

> Another solution is to consider that a new user has to understand how 
> autotools is working anyway and rather make more effort to write better 
> tutorials. They can be accessible from the start page. To go a bit 
> further, we could provide interactive tutorials, like in games, asking 
> the user to create a project step by step. But it's quite some work.

We started that a bit on the hackfest but still I think the user doesn't
really need to understand autotools to write an application and we
should leave it out of his way most of the time.

> I don't know if you have seen it but recently, I have added some 
> tooltips to all target or group properties. I think it's needed to give 
> more explanation to the user. I have added it to both the label and the 
> entry. Perhaps it would be better to add them only to the label as it 
> can be a bit annoying for more experienced user. What do you think ?

Haven't looked at it but the idea sounds good. Adding them only to the
labels is what other applications usually do.

> Another thing which is annoying me, is that some properties are very 
> uncommon like Fortran compiler flags. So, I would prefer to hide them. 
> Previously, I have put an expander to hide all properties which have 
> their default value. I think you have remove them but I'm agree that 
> it's perhaps better now. Perhaps I can put the properties with a default 
> value at the end and resize the dialog to show only properties with a 
> non default value. This dialog needs to have a scrollbar anyway. Do you 
> have another ideas ? By example a combo where you can select new 
> properties ?

Just an idea, don't know if that's possible:
The whole properties dialog could be a GtkTreeView which display a list
like that:

CFLAGS   | -g -O2
CPPFLAGS | 
etc.

Either we only show the flags that are really set and give the user an
add/remove button where the first column becomes a combobox where the
user can choose the appropriate flag or we just grey out all flags that
aren't used.

Of course anything that isn't related to CFLAGS/JAVAFLAGS/VALAFLAGS,
whatever would still be a single entry or checkbox.

This way the whole dialog could also be smaller and scrolling would be
more convenient than scrolling just the whole dialog.

> Finally, perhaps it would be useful to be able to display the target or 
> the group properties dialog from the Project main menu item. I have seen 
> several users on the IRC which don't know how to set target properties. 
> The annoying things is that we need the project properties dialog too. 
> One solution could be to display the root node in the project view so 
> you can set project properties by selecting it. Do you have some other 
> ideas ?

Hmm, that one is tricky. Ideally, we would want to provide a shortcut to
edit the first executable target because that is what new users will hit
first.

Another idea would be to add some buttons to the project-view window
that make it more obvious that you can edit somewhere there than the
popup-menu.

But this needs some more discussion probably.

Regards,
Johannes