On Thu, 9 Mar 2000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> On 08 March 2000, Jamie Zawinski said:
>> Hi there, I've just started using Dia, and I think it's great!
>> It does almost everything I needed, and was pretty easy to figure
>> out. I do have a few suggestions/complaints, though:
>
> Hey, let's all chime in! My initial take is not quite as generous as
> Jamie's; here's a comment I just posted to freshmeat:
>
> Dia looks like a very promising start at a real diagram-drawing tool
> for the free software world. The biggest drawback right now is the
> near-total lack of documentation. The fundamental UI -- drawing lines
> and boxes and things, and connecting them up in intelligent ways --
> works *very* nicely. But the rest of the UI -- menus, tool modes,
> saving/exporting, etc. -- has a lot of little annoyances. Nothing
> fatal, just a continual source of friction between me and the
> program.
>
> which sums up my opinion nicely. Hopefully we can start doing something
> about the lack of documentation.
>
> Here are some of my UI gripes, as a complement to Jamie's wishlist:
>
> * filename follies: Dia doesn't do a good job of remembering
> the filename to export to. Try this:
Agreed!
> * the file selection/naming dialog is *deeply* brain-damaged; I don't
> know if this is a GTK problem, a GNOME problem, or a Dia problem,
> so I'll hold off on details until somebody asks
That's a GTK problem. It's the default GTK file browser. And I totally
agree, there's so much it ought to be able to do that it can't (e.g. show
.-files, show drive space)
> * why no default file extension, eg. when I ask to save as "foo",
> shouldn't it be saved as "foo.dia"?
Yes, if we can convince the file browser to do that.
> * when there's a problem saving or opening, the file selection dialog
> goes away and is replaced by a useless error dialog -- useless
> because all it has is the error message and an "OK" button. This
> information could probably go in the file selection dialog, and
> there's *no* good reason to make the file selection dialog
> completely disappear just because I mistype a filename!
True. Good point. I don't know if we can include the error message in the
file browser, but we should throw you back in, I guess.
> * that error message dialog pops up a long way from my mouse pointer,
> it doesn't have focus, and only Enter works to hit the "Ok" button
> -- not space. (I presume we can blame GTK and possibly my window
> manager [fvwm 2.2] for this, but it's still really stupid.)
That's definitely a window manager issue. Dia doesn't even try to put a
position on the window, and I'd be severely pissed if it did. Plug: Try
SawMill. It's a really nice WM, with a decent default look&feel, a useable
and flexible configuration program, and extendible in Lisp:)
> * dialogs in general pop up a long way from where I'd like them; eg.
> if I double click on the big "T" in the tools window to (I guess)
> set my default text style, the dialog is a long way from my mouse
> pointer. Again, I'm not sure if this is Dia's fault or my window
> manager's fault.
Again, it's your WM.
> * why are the main menus in the drawing window only accessible with
> Button-3? Whatever happened to putting menus in a menubar at the
> top of the window? Putting everything into popup menus puts me in
> mind of the horrible "access-everything-in-the-world" 73-level-deep
> menu perpetrated by Windoze 95 and slavishly imitated by KDE and
> Gnome (this is not a good thing).
This idea is mainly stolen from Gimp, I think. I find it a useful place to
have the menus, as you don't have to move your mouse anywhere. But I don't
see any reason the menus couldn't go on top of the window, too (optionally
-- I wouldn't want to waste space there).
> * sometimes when I delete an object with Ctrl+D, a "This object
> has no properties" dialog pops up. (The object is correctly
> deleted.) As usual, this dialog is a long way from my pointer,
> doesn't get focus, and can only be dismissed with Enter (not
> space).
Yes, I noticed that, too. Fortunately, it's not modal, so I mostly just
ignore it. But it should not happen.
> * I assume that double-clicking the big "T" is supposed to allow
> me to set default text properties, and ditto with the other
> object-selection icons in that box. However, it doesn't
> work too well. Here are some problems.
> - it pops up a dialog a long from my pointer that doesn't have focus
WM.
> - why "Apply" and "Close"? whatever happened to "Ok" and "Cancel"?
> (I really like having "Apply" when editing a single object, but
> what's the point of it when setting defaults?)
> - "Close" appears to be "Cancel", ie. "Forget everything I just
> told you and go away" -- so why is this the default? Ie. when I
> make changes in this window and hit Enter, the changes are lost.
Good point. We need to standardize those, preferably to the Gnome (or KDE)
standard.
> - the correlation between the text in the Font button and which item
> is checked in the pop-up menu under that button is, umm, tenuous
> at best. Try this:
> + bring up the text "Object defaults" dialog (ie. double-click
> the big T)
> + select a font different from what's showing in the "Font" button
> + the name of the font you selected should now be in the button
> + "Close" (ie. cancel) the dialog
> + bring it back, ie. double-click the big T again
> + the font name in the Font button is back to what it was before
> + but hit the button to bring up the menu: the selected item
> in the popup menu is the font you selected but then cancelled!
I see it. The menu doesn't get reset when 'Close' is selected.
> * no visible rubber-band when dragging to select objects
Huh? I see a nice dashed rubber-band.
Thanks for the input. We really need to hear the things that irritate
people and get those fixed ASAP. I would like to have all such problems
fixed before 1.0.
-Lars
--
Lars Clausen (http://shasta.cs.uiuc.edu/~lrclause) | H�rdgrim of Numenor
"I do not agree with a word that you say, but I | Retainer of Sir Kegg
will defend to the death your right to say it." | of Westfield
--Evelyn Beatrice Hall paraphrasing Voltaire | Chaos Berserker of Khorne
