[Labplot-devel] A "hello", a couple of question and a "feature request"

[Alexander Semke]

Hi Ricardo,

> I'm interested on helping the project. I'm not a programmer, but I can help
> translating content into Spanish and, if nobody else is available, into
> Italian. I am Physicists and I used to use Origin a lot of years ago
> (version 6 maybe, I can't remember!) and at least one plot on my PhD thesis
> was done on an old LabPlot version :) But I'm not doing research right now
> (you know, the infamous "crisis").
Thank you for your interest in LabPlot.

> So here there are my questions:
> 
> - Which translation tools do you use? For some years I helped to translate
> another open source project that use a pootle server, and a couple of times
> I used Lokalize (I cannot say that I master it, but it is not difficult to
> use).
We moved to the kde infrastructure and the translation is done by kde's i18n-
team. Maybe Yuri can say more about how you could contribute here.


> - With the project moving to KDE's infrastructure, I think also mailing
> list will migrate. Is that right?
We communicate now on kde-edu mailing list. But the old labplot-devel is still 
active and you'll get responses there too. But please, if you don't mind, use 
kde-edu since this should become the official way in feature.


> Finally, the feature request.
> 
> The new UI is great and really makes the program easy to use: it's a huge
> leap from the 1.6 experience, good work! But I think there is a small
> problem, even if I'm not sure how to solve it.
> 
> When you create a plot and select an item to modify its characteristics,
> the object s highlighted in blue. While this highlight helps to recognize
> which object is being edited, it have the problem that some of the changes
> will not be visible until you unselect the object.
> 
> For example, suppose you have a plot with symbols and lines. If you click
> on the line in order to change its colour, you'll only see blue until you
> unselect the line by clicking outside the plot! That means that you cannot
> see the property you are changing while you change it! It took me a while
> to discover that changing colours in fact worked...
Yes, I'm aware of this problem and this is really annoying for the case  you 
just described. I agree.

> Is it possible, instead of highlighting the object on blue (or any other
> colour) to _dim_ the rest of the plot? I think this will be more clear for
> the user.
Yes, something like this would help. I thought of using kind of blur effect 
for the selected objects. To draw the selection region bigger that the actual 
object would also help. In this case you'll see the blue line for the 
selection but also the actual color of the, e.g., curve you're editing now.
But I think a nice blur effect will look better.


Regards
Alexander