[Kst] Event detection in kst ?

[Nicolas.Brisset at eurocopter.com]

On Wednesday 07 April 2004 19:57, George Staikos wrote:
>    Great!  0.97 has some enhancements, including a wizard for quickly
> loading large amounts of data.  
As the original author of the "Grace ASCII import wizard", codename gaiw 
(http://gaiw.sf.net), I took some time to look at the new kst import wizard, 
which in essence does the same as I tried to do with gaiw. I think it still 
needs some improvements, but this version is already much better than what 
Grace offers.
Even though gaiw was my first attempt at C++ and is probably the worst C++ 
that was ever written, I think the GUI I came up with has some good usability 
ideas. My colleagues use it a lot around here, and as a matter of fact I do 
not get many complaints about it. So maybe it would be nice to improve the 
kst wizard to include some of these ideas. In terms of code, it sure is 
better to recode it since gaiw's design is so awful. I'll have a closer look 
at the code to see whether I have made enough progress to be able to help 
there :-)

>    This is already mostly implemented.  It should be activated in the next
> release.  
GREAT ! I knew I should ask :-)

Well, I'm "hooked" and actually spent some time to review the menus and play 
around with kst today, and I must say I'm REALLY IMPRESSED !!! 
- It is much faster (2x to 3x) than xmgrace, which I held for the fastest 
plotting tool around
- the menus and GUIs are much more usable even though one needs some time to 
understand the objects that are manipulated (vectors, curves, equations, 
etc...) and how they interact (I've not figured out this filter thing yet but 
I'm not sure it is fully active yet...)
- the feature set is much bigger than I first thought.

To finish this rather long mail, here is my wishlist for the next version(s) 
in decreasing order of importance to me:
- improve the data import wizard to allow adding curves based on column NAMES 
rather than column numbers (I'm pretty sure it is planned, but I could not do 
it!), plus some flexibility (like in gaiw) to group them in different plots 
in one shot. Currently, one can achieve more or less the same as with gaiw 
but it needs many invocations of the wizard.
- add some flexibility to the layout of graphs (not necessarily uniform grid), 
either with a separate GUI where we could move icons around and resize them, 
or directly with the mouse
- allow to draw basic shapes to comment the plots (like the current labels, 
but arrows, boxes and ellipses would be nice too)
- scripting/batch command language
- legends: possibility of moving legend boxes (click & drag or in GUI) and to 
have many items on the same line to save vertical space
- axes: more control over the ticks (major/minor tick intervals), label 
stagger and rotation, possibility to show the grid (continuation of 
minor/major ticks)
- different line width/type and symbol size/color properties
- 3D plots (not really the least important, but is is a whole topic !)

When all this is implemented, I'll throw away xmgrace and live happy :-)

Keep up the good work :-)

Nicolas