Re: [UI] Sheets and Objects dialog

[Steffen Macke <sdteffen gmail com>]

Hi Stef,

Please excuse, if the moderaton takes some time. It's holiday season :-)
I think that anyone who wants to do serious Dia developmemt should be
on the mailing list. And the sheets and objects dialogue is definitely
serious.
For use cases and requirements: Have you checked the mailing list
archives and Bugzilla already? If you have problems locating things,
let us know.
Custom sheets do not require any new sheets, they could be simply a
new combination of existing shapes. Dia already ships an extensive
library of shapes, but users might want to combine exactly those
shapes that they need. Think of the Cisco and networking shapes:
Usually you'll use a selection across several sheets.
Exchanging sheets is already possible: Simply copy the sheet file to
your ~/.dia/sheets folder.
If that's too complicated for your users, I would suggest that you
have a look at the diashapes tool and the Dia Shape Repository:
http://dia-installer.de/shapes.html
I'm sorry I didn't answer all your questions - holiday season :-)

Regards,
Steffen


On 7/14/10, demurgets free fr <demurgets free fr> wrote:
> hi,
>
> I subscribed to this list because I sent a complete mail on the 3td this
> month
> and it still not have been moderated.
> I'd like to make a couple of UI enhancements to Dia, and before that, remove
> the
> use of deprecated Gtk widgets.
>
> I started with GtkComboBox and took quite some time to port the Sheets and
> Objects dialog located in the File menu.
> I stopped halfway to just think if the dialog could be improved first.
>
> So, first things first, I'd like to know the use cases of this dialog:
>       - is it useful to customize system sheets? maybe to reduce the number of
> shapes?
>       - is this to add personal items to them? because the problem is you can add
> UML
> shapes to Network for instance, which just defeats the purpose of the
> classification
>       - adding new type of sheets? but how to remove them?
>
> This involves a lot of code, including a startup warning dialog if the
> system
> sheet is newer and if you want to overwrite your local customizations.
> I'd like to improbe the UI in light of removing deprecated widgets.
>
> So the use cases seem to be:
>       - creating custom sheets
>       - customizing system sheets
>       - adding/removing custom shapes
>
> If I'm not mistaken, customizing system sheets should be ruled-out, even if
> they
> are a lot of items.
> Creating custom sheets is nice, but you need to write shape files.
>
> Wouldn't it make it simpler to have:
>       - some sort of bookmarks (a la Firefox) lying in this dialog first *and*
> accessible from a popup in the palette directly to quickly bookmark an item
>       - the bookmarks go in a unique "Custom" sheet (ideally always visible)
>       - when you have 1+ bookmark, you automatically get this "Custom" sheet
>
> Anyway what's the point of creating your own sheets if you need .shape
> files?
> That means you'll need to edit XML at some point.
> If users want to create sheets, they can edit them using XML, the DTD is
> simple.
> For exchanging sheets, maybe it would be better
> to propose an option to import a sheet you got from the Internet for
> instance.
>
> flames, suggestions, what are your opinion on that?
>
> --Stef
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