Hi Akarsh, On Mon, Jul 11, 2011 at 11:54 AM, Akarsh Simha <[email protected]>wrote:
> Dear KDE, > > I contribute to KStars. John Tapsell pointed out to us that our > interface would not tell us what was interesting. So someone who's new > to astronomy would not learn much by looking at our current interface. > > John suggested we have a box that tells users what to look at, a > "What's interesting" box, that would programmatically generate a list > of interesting objects that are visible from your location tonight > (taking into account a bunch of parameters including your equipment, > location, light pollution levels, level of experience), and give you > ample information on those objects in a side-bar. For instance, to the > beginner, it would tell him what planets are visible in the sky > presently. It's hard to explain in words, so here's an ugly mockup: > http://i.imgur.com/YkGY4.png > Awesome idea, indeed. > > Now, I think this is an awesome idea, but I don't know how to build an > interface like that -- a foldable list of celestial objects, a lot of > text under each of those, a few action items that are tailored to that > object (eg: You could get KStars to point a telescope to a planet, but > that would not make sense for an entire constellation), and other > programmatically generated text like "visible after 3 hours" or > "visible now". In addition, this window should be scrollable (not > shown in the mockup). > > If object-specific action links are too complicated, that's not a > problem. We already have those in a popup-menu in KStars, so all I > need then, is one action that says "Center map on <object>". > > Someone told me that QML is great for this. But how would I use QML to > achieve this? > Keeping in mind that QML is a UI and interaction design tool, its pretty easy to do the Interesting Box using QML. Whether to use QML or traditional QWidgets is a decision KStars should make. In this case, pros of QML is a fluid UI, however, some people feel that using QML makes stuff such as the Interesting Box look "inconsistent" with the rest of QWidget UI. So you gotta decide :) Once you've made up your mind, if you have a class whose xyzMethod(latitude, longitude) can return an structure/class filled with data, its very trivial to use that in QML :) All you have to do is call some QML magic in KStars to register that class with QML, and you're ready to go. > I plan to generate the list of objects by some magic that I haven't > yet thought about, pull the text out of some database (the text > description is static, of course, and this could be flat file or > SQLite). To start with, let's just have one action 'Slew map to > $object' > > Regards > Akarsh > > >> Visit http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-devel#unsub to > unsubscribe << > Cheers, Shantanu Tushar (UTC +0530) http://www.shantanutushar.com
>> Visit http://mail.kde.org/mailman/listinfo/kde-devel#unsub to unsubscribe <<
