Ippei wrote: > Hi all, > > Lately, I've assisted a friend of mine to install hugin on his PC. The > following are what I, a mac user, realised: > > - General: It felt more stable than Mac version, but lacking quality > assuarance leaving tools that appeal only to geeks and detemined > users.
can you specify what you mean by "lacking quality assurance" and "leaving tools that appeal only to geeks and determined users" ? what would you expect to be different? > - Installer: By default, leaves tons of aliases on desktop. None > except one for hugin.exe is relevant for 90% of the users. I can't comment about the installer that is on Sourceforge since I have not built it and do not know the details. I have built and distributed snapshot installers whose purpose was testing. As such, the default of that installer was to install plenty of things - things that I would not install in a production installer geared at the general public. I agree with your comment that the default install should satisfy the majority of users, not the power users; and it should leave advanced features as options, not as default. In general, there is one single icon for hugin on the desktop. All other icons are droplets for enblend and enfuse, which indeed appeal to power users. In a testing setting I decided that installing them by default was the right thing to do. Accidentally, it also appeal to power users. Erik Krause's droplets are one of the things I do keep on my desktop (and no hugin icon - I start programs from the QuickLaunch). Because they are convenient, and easy to use. But I agree they are not relevant to the majority of users, and should be optional, with default not to install them. > why the hell do they all have same icons? The droplets don't have an icon at all. This is the default look of a windows shortcut to an executable BAT file, and they are all BAT files. To assign different icons is an effort, and obviously nobody has judged it important enough. Windows users have different aesthetic values as Mac users. > It also is desireable to add just the "Hugin" 'program' in Start menu > rather than forcing users to find the "hugin.exe" 'executable file' > from among many. I am not sure I understand what you mean. In Windows, the "All Programs" entry inside the Start menu is the equivalent of the "Applications" entry in the Mac's finder. But this is where the analogy stops. To my understanding, Mac users are used to only have the program in "Application". I have too little experience of the Mac to know where documentation and other things go. I have seen only a Utilities subfolder - all the rest are apps, all at the same level. In Windows, the commonly accepted practice is for every software publisher to add their own folder insode "All Programs" and to put many things in there, including documentation links, readme files, and uninstaller. Moreover, Windows software publishers engage in a competition for "user mindshare", which result in a nearly unbearable pollution of the desktop, the quick launch bar, the status bar and the All Programs folder with icons designed to remind the user of that particular software. I find myself very often re-arranging things to be more adapted to my way of working: - I leave everything intact in the "All Programs" folder, but copy from there those icons that I need (the equivalent to the mac's .app icons, if I understand the Mac correctly) into my own "Apps" folder, from where I launch them. - I keep my own "Apps" folder in the quick launch bar, so that it opens with a list of small icons that I click to start the app I intend to start. - I ignore the pollution in the "All Programs" folder. My only reasons to go in there is to search for an app that I just installed or that I seldom used. "All Programs" is so useless, that I even have to re-sort it alphabetically from time to time. - after installing a program, I often have to clean up / delete icons that are installed on the desktop and in the quick-launch bar, and I have to look at the startup items to remove useless resource hogs that are installed to start on startup and occupy the visually important status bar. within this context, I think that the hugin Windows installer does a decent job, and I am not sure if what you mean would not mean changing the metaphore to the Mac's metaphore. > - Autopano-SIFT: Is the warning against patent violation subtle? > Didn't realise one being displayed. I guess it was mentioned in the > loong license text. AFAIK it is displayed in the flurry of text that is outputted when autopano-SIFT-C runs. > - Documents: The README and other files are installed without > extension. How can I read those files? Who knows... That's how Windows > works, so please take care. This is a regression compared to my snapshot installer. When preparing my snapshot installers, I would *manually* convert all the README files (Windows is CR+LF, while those in SVN are not) and add the .txt extension. I have not thought of how to automate this in the build. Probably it is possible, and in any case, whoever builds the installer should indeed take care. > - Icons: First, they are unly; ... plenty of good and valid points. I guess many of them could be implemented by people with enough time and motivation. I don't know much about the technical issues of icons on the Windows platform: I consider it generally an ugly platform, so maybe this is why I don't bother that much about those things that seems to bother you? I know Mac users value aesthetics more than Windows users. > - Lastly, could README_JP file be attached for the Japanese users? I > can provide converted PDF or HTML files if that's needed, though I > remember Shift-JIS is considered default for Japanese Windows. that should definitely happen. When I worked through the different readme files in deciding whether to put them into my snapshot installer (and thus in files used to generate the installer as they are still recorded in SVN), I tried to open the README_JP file and it displayed gibberish. Windows is known to have problem with charsets. Other non-Latin charsets open well on my Windows XP box. An HTML or a PDF would surely help. > One more thing: > - The file downloaded from Sourceforge was compiled from SVN, hence > appears as a release build. In future we should upload binary releases > compiled from the source release. This was an issue with the CMake build, and I corrected it to the best of my knowledge with Rev 3503. Before that, there was a TODO mentioned in the root level CMakeLists.txt (actually the comment is still there): # TODO: at each release, set current SVN revision here! This has not happened when the 0.7.0 tarball was released, so that building it would call the release 0.7.0.0, which is inherently wrong, and has further consquences on the Windows build, because unlike the Linux (and Mac?) build extracting the SVN revision number was not automated. I have automated that, and also the above mentioned TODO at each release (although it would need to be tested), so that when stripping the .svn folders from the filesystem tree that will eventually become a tarball, everything should work automatically. Then building from the tarball should also work effortless and as intended in Windows. I hope my comments shed some lights on the particularities of the windows build. Maybe they may motivate some of the windows contributors to do those things you are suggesting, most of which make sense to me but are just too low on my list of priorities to bother. And if there are still open questions (I know I lack a lot of Mac-knowledge) or misunderstandings, please keep the thread going. Yuv Yuv --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "hugin and other free panoramic software" group. A list of frequently asked questions is available at: http://wiki.panotools.org/Hugin_FAQ To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/hugin-ptx -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
