RE: Dia's user interface

["Young, Robert" <Robert Young dsto defence gov au>]

> Lars Clausen wrote:
>
> On Tue, 23 Apr 2002, Adrien Beau wrote:
> > On Sunday 21 April 2002 14:43, Lars Clausen wrote:
> > > If there are any,
> > > could you point out the worst problems that Dia has in its
> > > interface?  I'd like to turn some attention to that as we
> > > work towards a 1.0 release.
> >
> > It's a minor problem, but it seems to me that "Diagram modified!"
> > is almost always displayed in the status bar. If I understand
> > correctly, it is just a file modified indicator.
> >
> > First error with that: never ever shout at your users. No
> > exclamation mark. Personnaly, in the few GUIs I've written,
> > I've only used excl. marks in "impossible case" dialogs
> > (where assertions would be better, but I don't use Java 1.4
> > yet). Always be calm and nice to your user. Especially when
> > there are problems.
> >
> > Second error with that: it's way too big for its purpose.
> > It's distracting to have this status message ever present.
> > Why not do what Vim (and others probably) do? Put a * in
> > the window title, as in "varicella.dia *", when the file
> > is modified, remove it when the file is saved or undo
> > operations bring the diagram back to the state that was
> > saved (the latter one being not necessarily easy).
>
> I agree with you on this.  I have considered removing the !, 
> but I never
> thought of removing the whole string.  Three randomly sampled 
> GTK programs
> (Sodipodi, Gnumeric and Gnucash) don't have any indication of 
> modification
> at all.  Gedit has "(modified)" in the window title, whereas 
> Gimp prepends
> a *.  I think we should go with the *.  Since we warn before closing a
> modified diagram anyway, the information is not that important.
>
> Now's the question:  Is there some more relevant information 
> to put there?
> Currently selected tool?  Number of objects selected (after a select
> operation)?  Something?

Current coordinates would be great (even which page you are currently in) -
in the currently selected units :-). When dragging, the offset from the
original drag point in x,y and distance (sqrt(x^2+y^2)). I know this makes
it just like a CAD program, but in many ways Dia is a CAD program - when
drawing electrical (etc) diagrams I have no doubt that Dia is a CAD package.
Distances are useful for designing shapes that have the same proportions,
for drawing simple 'to scale' diagrams, for making drawings look 'nice'
because they're in proportion.

I also vote for the current grid snap status, maybe even clicking on the
value changes it or brings up the dialog to change it.

Thanks,
Rob.