[Kst] update changes

Brisset, Nicolas Nicolas.Brisset at eurocopter.com
Wed May 31 18:07:44 CEST 2006


> Right.... you need 'update multiple...' for view objects.  
> Its on the list - it won't make into this friday's DR, 
> obviously, but maybe we can try to do it for
> 1.3 in a month or so... 
Multiple view objects edition sounds good (even though the names would
need to be changed to reflect their nature before it can be used for
legend property setting) :-)

Now, I've been thinking about this legend stuff quite a bit (from a
usability/user's perspective), and I have the feeling that we should
address the issues we have anyway. What I would suggest is to keep the
"Appearance" tab of the plot dialog for what its name implies: change
appearance. We could keep the new "Match contents to plot" button (the
feature can be useful in some cases) but add it at the bottom of the
"Contents" tab, in a "Legend contents" section where we could have that
and a "Customize legend contents" button. That way, there would be a
clear separation between contents and appearance, which is clearly what
the tabs are trying to suggest.
Building up on this, here are the concrete changes I'd suggest (I'm
ready to open a bugzilla entry for that if it can't be implemented
quickly to avoid it getting lost):

- in the plot dialog/"Appearance" tab, add back all legend and legend
box appearance options (as previously) so that they can be set for all
plots when the user chooses to apply to "this window"
- move the "Match contents to plot" checkbox to a "Legend contents"
section in the plot dialog/"Contents" tab so that one or all legends can
be reset to plot contents
- move the current "Modify" (or "Edit" ?) button in the legend part to
the "Contents" tab as well, and call it something like "Customize legend
contents". It would call the upper part (contents) of the current legend
modification dialog.
- make it so that that a right-click on a legend opens an aggregate
dialog with both contents and appearance parts (whether the code behind
it can be factored being a pure developer's concern :-))

This is sort of going back to the previous situation (with some
improvements, though) but the fact that nobody complained about its
usability for quite a while (until bug #120484 came, and the changes
were made before we realized after some time that they created some
usability issues) is a sign that it wasn't so bad. In fact, the way I
see it we broke something that was OK when trying to add the content
customization feature in the wrong place.

Thoughts ?

Nicolas


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