Re: 0.96 usability

[Lars Ræder Clausen <lars raeder dk>]

On Sat, 2008-10-18 at 13:58 -0400, Ian Darwin wrote:
> Your web page states:
>
> > Try downloading Dia and tell us what you think of it. 
>
> You did ask, so here goes:
>
> Compared with any number of other graphics programs I have used over the 
> years, there is some good functionality here but work needs to be 
> invested in usability:
>
> 1) If you select an entire drawing, or even multiple objects, there is 
> no (obvious) way to resize the composite object. All normal draw 
> programs on all three platforms (*nix, OS X and Windoze) allow you to 
> resize a composite using corner or edge drag handles.
>
> [If there is some way that is hidden in your online documentation, that 
> doesn't count, because a drawing program needs to be "intuitive" in the
> sense of working like most other draw programs do.]

No, there is no way to do this, and that is very unfortunate.  It's not
just a matter of adding a drag box, it requires some significant changes
in the code.

> 2) After changing the zoom, it is quite possible to get part of your 
> drawing off the viewable page, and, neither the scroll bars nor any 
> obvious gesture will bring it back. You can get it back by dragging the 
> mouse off the page, but (a) that only helps if you know what direction, 
> and (b) the View->Best Fit does not appear to work; a user of other 
> programs would expect this to make the drawing fit the page. Or, there 
> should be another View menu item "Fit to page" if that's not what this 
> item is intended to do.

I can't reproduce this.  The scrollbars work nicely, the "Best Fit" menu
item has the quirk that is any items are selected, it will fit to those,
but if none are selected, it fits all.  There's also the navigation
cross in the lower right-hand corner.  I'm guessing (wildly) that this
is a 64-bit issue.

> 3) It drops core quite often, but I'm running it on 64-bit and on 
> OpenBSD so this is probably the typical Linux programmers' lack of 
> awareness of portability - if I find the cause and it's in your code 
> rather than one of the many libraries used, I'll do a bug report.

Hans has been quite active with Valgrind, so I don't think there's a lot
of issues left, but I can't rule it out.  It's very stable for me.

-Lars