notes on 0.91 pre, mostly win32

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

i will file some of these as bugs later.
these are mostly win32 specific.

On my desktop I am running Microsoft Windows 98 with 128 MB RAM.
My display is 800x600
On my laptop I am running Microsoft Windows 98 with 256 MB RAM.
My display is 1024x768

dia 091 pre1-3
Freshly installed and launched by the installer i get the error message

warning: failed to load external entity "(null)"
warning: failed to load external entity "(null)"

If i try and run Dia using the batch file/wrappper script hack i get
Syntax Error
Out of Enviroment Space.

The "Out of Enviroment Space" error causes the script to fail and no home
directory gets setup.  This can be fixed by changing my DOS settings but i
say again that we should do like java (and various other programs) simply
fall back to using %windir% if %homedir% is not avialable.  I should also
note that the batch file is no use if i am trying to run Dia on Wine.

The Dia installer uses "dia" instead of "Dia" and it just looks a bit off
to me.  I am willing to provide a patch.
I would like it if the installer inlcuded the version, I have two
identical entries in the Programs menu and in the Add Remove progams
Control Panel.  From previous use of NSIS i suspect this might be quite
difficult to add.

The font size used in Dia 0.90 was smaller, pretty close to the default
windows font size.  The font size in Dia 0.91 pre1-3 is a lot and even on
the larger of my displays this still leaves things feeling quite cramped.

View -> Redraw.
Ideally this is not something that should be here, when the redraw code
works properly it will not be necessary.  In the short term it at
least allows the user to compensate for redraw problems, but hopefully we
can get rid of it at some stage.

Keybindings, my bad ...
it is even more important that i get these done now that users can no
longer easily override the defaults. :(
Delete == Delete is really really important.
I thought for a minute that the Zoom keybindings had been removed but it
turns out that they were not there to begin with.  I should set them to
match the HIG and worry about internationalisation problems later.

Menu Bar
If you use the menu bar docked to the diagram window the Input Methods
menu breaks and appears empty.  seems to work okay when undocked.

Input methods.
I would prefer if we used
View -> Character Coding ->
which would be the same as in Mozilla Composer.

Menu icons: it would be nice if we used the same star icon that other
Gnome apps are using for Help -> About.  I think it is a stock icon in
Gnome.

If i try and turn on Anti Alias, i get an error message saying that this
version of Dia was compiled without libart.  I looked at the code in
app/menu.c and there is an #ifdef HAVE_LIBART so there should not even be
a menu item there.

Objects
i think i put an extra seperator at the bottom of the Objects menu
(underneath Align Vertical) by mistake.

Tools menu would look better if there was another seperator after Modify,
Magnify, Scroll.

There are some problems with the quit behaviour i have to look at.


Hopefully i will get Pango sorted out and be able to compile on linux
soon.

Alan Horkan
http://advogato.org/person/AlanHorkan/