[Kst] Interesting feedback from a scidavis/Origin user

[Nicolas Brisset]

Hi,

I recently posted a message on the scidavis-contributors list to see if there would be interest to cooperate in any way. I haven't received any feedback (yet?) from the developers, but one user posted the message below (relevant extracts quoted):

"I'm not scidavis contributor, but user of such kind of software. I've never seen kst before. I've discovered your multiple editing. If I need to plot 3 or 4 graphs on the same kind it saves a lot of time."
[...]
"To my opinion your tool badly lacks of abilities to manipulate data in tables (like in scidavis, labplot or origin) before it can be plotted. It's needed for scientific data analysis. And moreover, I think that using kst files, Like you are doing now is not so good Idea. To gave my plots to colleagues I have to give them all the initial files and your kst. And I haven't tested what will happen, if some  of the data files are moved or renamed."
[...]
"And one of sufficient features, you need to do, to get scientific community attention is to implement microcal origin files opening). There is liborigin, which can help you handle this."
[...]
"Your plotting engine, using opengl seems very promising to me."

What I think of that is:
1) in one of the next versions, we really have to work on the view vectors dialog. I have played a bit with labplot, which is very interesting. It all goes in the direction of one of my recent bug reports requesting an improved vector view with multiple vectors and adjustable format
2) Kst is really under-publicized and does not have the reputation it deserves!
3) adding support for Matlab's .mat files and Origin files would definitely be nice to attract new users; the same person wrote me in a subsequent mail: "The software like kst is badly needed for science. I'm working in a place with ~20000 of scientists, and, I think, the most of them use Origin to plot. I was trying to move my lab to Linux and the only thing we really lack is good data analysis software. Some scientists, who are used to programming are using gnuplot etc. But most people are scared of programming and want to do everything using mouse. So the place for the best open source data manipulation software is still vacant. Your project is the only one GUI data manipulation software which is actively developed, as far as I found." Now, that says a lot!!!
4) we have to test the OpenGL engine more, on most of my systems I get blurred text and it is slower than the default paint engine. Sometimes it even crashes. I'd be curious to know what other people's experiences are.

Nicolas