[kplato] address list?

[Dag Andersen]

Torsdag 02 november 2006 09:36 skrev Thomas Zander:
> On Tuesday 31 October 2006 08:55, Dag Andersen wrote:
> > You can link tasks in the gantt view by pressing LMB over the "from"
> > task and drag the mouse to the "to" task. Double clicking the
> > resulting link will bring up a dialog.
> > You are not the first to ask about linking, It's not the most obviuos
> > way of doing things, and I hope to have a better solution for koffice
> > 2.0.
>
> Hi all.
> I have to admit I saw these issues as well while playing with KPlato.
> Its harder then it should be, IMOHO :)
>
> There are a couple of gotchas that we can solve in the kplato code.
> First is that dragging is a case of hit and miss. This is due to two
> problems. First, the feedback is rather small and hard to notice.
> Second dragging to anywhere on the node should be enough, though it
> apparently isn't (I'm not sure why not).
> Last, the direction I am dragging in (from a to b, or from b to a)
> matters. It gives me a "Cannot link these nodes" if I drag 'the wrong
> way'.
> If I drag a line from the right side of one node to the left side of the
> other the drag just is ignored since I was suppost to drag only from
> the left side of the first to the right of the second.
> If the above sentence sounds confusing, that's because it is :)
First, I'll like to say that I don't really want to use the gantt chart for 
this activity at all, even if KDGantt has better support for this kind of 
thing now. I plan (hope) to design a dedicated "dependency editor" for this, 
possibly based on the flake stuff.

The reason that the position on a node matters is that we support different 
types of links; StartStart, FinishFinish and FinishStart (with StartFinish 
still todo). The reason why you need to be *on* a node when dragging/dropping 
is that kdgantt doesn't support anything else and I haven't taken the time to 
change it ;)
>
> I would suggest to make the dragging have immediate feedback. Start a
> drag and even while dragging show the dependency lines (so with arrow
> and angled) instead of the straight line.
> Instead of forcing the user to stop the drag at exactly the right
> position continuesly find the most appropriate node even while dragging
> and connect to that.  Meaning that if I get in a 40 pixel radius of my
> node the connection I wanted to make is already visible and I can stop
> dragging at that point.
>
> I would also like it if KPlato could (in 2.0) use the ToolBox and create
> a tool for making connections. As well as a tool for inserting new
> nodes via marking a specific time area. 
This is nice to have do if you want to just create a simple plan with fixed 
start/end times. If you want kplato to do the scheduling, however, you need 
to define resoureces, estimates etc. This is hard to do with drag and drop.
> This additionally to the 
> current menu approach helps users that like to drag/drop. A bit similar
> to how you insert a new event in KOrganizer.
I agree that the dialogs are cumbersome to use, I'm lokking at the model/view 
stuff to see if I can get rid of (or at least simplfy) a lot of the dialogs.
>
>
> Cheers!

-- 
Mvh
Dag Andersen