[Kstars-devel] Proposal on "revamping" What's Interesting

[Akarsh Simha]

Dear KStars team

Here is a proposal on revamping What's Interesting. The reason I'm
posting this is to let you stop me from making this, if you like the
old WI.

In any case, I will start working on the revamping. If you feel that
existing WI interface should co-exist with my new tool or we should
somehow merge the two gracefully, let me know.

Aim: To provide object suggestions to the user automatically depending
on some fuzzy parameters.

Wasn't this what "What's Interesting" was created for?

Yes, and it is awesome as it is, but has two problems -- (1) the user
seldom wants to choose which type of object they wish to observe, and
(2) the user wants only interesting objects, not an entire list of
NGCs and ICs including every sparse open cluster and faint fuzzy
galaxy.

While WI was designed from the beginning with the aim of automatically
finding interesting objects, we never got around to finding a good
logic for that -- it was too complicated a problem. So the solution, I
think, is to just hard-code lists of interesting objects. Part
programmatic, part by-hand. But even if we do this, problem 1 still
remains.

My solution is to (1) change the interface to show one object,
selected with some random fuzzy logic, kind of like a notification --
the user can acknowledge it ("Skip" or "Mark as observed") or the
object ceases to be well-placed in the sky (kind of like a time-out
for a notification); (2) hand-code lists of interesting objects for
various user experience levels.

Objects skipped/already observed by the observer may reappear again
later, provided it's a different day. There is also a history of
suggestions that is accessible somewhere, so that the user can look at
past suggestions.

In the simplest form, I will begin to implement (1), which calls for a
change of the MVC setup behind the scenes. Instead of having a model
for each kind of object, we will have only one model. And there will
be a list view of objects, and a current suggestion view.

Regards
Akarsh