Re: [Qgis-user] My first weekend with QGIS (UI)

[Régis Haubourg]

Hi John, and many thanks for your constructive approach, that is so
valuable.

> > * Plugins > Manage and Install: the one plugin I looked at was the
> > >   "eastcustomlabeling" plugin. But when I followed the links to it
> > >   from the Plugins dialog, I get 404 Not Found.
> > >   http://hub.qgis.org/projects/easycustomlabeling
> > >   Not sure if this is a larger issue or just this plugin?
> >
> >
> > Plugin author issue to update links to their plugin homepage.
> Presumably the hub.qgis.org URL was correct at one time.
> Seems like there should have been a redirect...


I am the author and I just published a 1.3.5 version with updated
repository. In fact it was a very old fix, that I forgot to release in a
new version, thanks for raising the issue.

I also funded the QEP (aka "design proposal" or "Request for Comments")
about porting labeling callouts, and much more features to qgis core.
I'm currently try to see if my previous employer is still ready to fund
that for qgis 3.
Fingers crossed, but if anyone else is willing to have that natively,
fundings are welcome.
Régis



2017-01-25 10:32 GMT+01:00 Sandro Santilli :

> On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 01:29:38AM -0500, John Hawkinson wrote:
> > By the way, can anyone here send me a mantra for osgeo registration?
> > (No reply following https://www.osgeo.org/cgi-bin/ldap_create_user.py)
>
> Mantra sent in private mail.
>
> --strk;
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Re: [Qgis-user] My first weekend with QGIS (UI)

[Sandro Santilli]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 01:29:38AM -0500, John Hawkinson wrote:
> By the way, can anyone here send me a mantra for osgeo registration?
> (No reply following https://www.osgeo.org/cgi-bin/ldap_create_user.py)

Mantra sent in private mail.

--strk;
___
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Unsubscribe: https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/qgis-user

Re: [Qgis-user] My first weekend with QGIS (UI)

[John Hawkinson]

Nathan Woodrow  wrote on Sat, 21 Jan 2017
at 20:20:20 +1000 in 
:

> You are right that this is best sent to the dev list as that is where we
> all hang out, the user email is mainly for end users who may or may not be
> involved in the development.  I will forward this to the dev list for more
> feedback for you.

Looks like it never made it there. I asusme it's OK to keep going on 
qgis-user.

> > * There is no no keyboard shortcut to switch between panels, at least
> >   when the panels are docked.
> 
> I have thought about this before.  It's easy to do just need to work
> out a good workflow for the shortcuts that makes sense. I have
> thought about Ctrl+1,2,3,4 etc but unsure

This is somewhat of an architecture-specific issue.  OSX defines a
shortcut for cycling windows within an application.  Cmd-` to cycle
forward through the ring buffer (ordered by most recently used), and
Cmd-~ (aka Cmd-Shift-`) to cycle in the reverse direction.
Windows doesn't have this, so would have to come up with its own
shortcut but the answer is easy for OSX.

http://superuser.com/questions/435602/shortcut-in-windows-7-to-switch-between-same-applications-windows-like-cmd
suggests that maybe Ctrl-TAB is the right choice under Windows.
Not really sure.

And of course, since Cmd-` half-works in OSX, there's clearly some
kind of Qt integration or window parenting issue.

> > * The "Step up" and "Step down" functions (e.g. up/down arrows for
> >   adjusting the point size of fonts or width of strokes/outlines,
> >   etc.) are sometimes scaled inadequately.
> 
> See comment about widget padding on OS X.

See my comment to Nyall -- I didnt' mean the appearance of the widgets,
I meant the magnitude of the default stepsize functionally -- and upon
review, I wonder if it should perahps be a logarithmic rather than
linear, at least for map units.

Although...I probably need a better grounding in what map units actually
are. I assume they are relative to the scale that a map is
rendered at in the composer, although I've seen funny shifts in size
between the composer and the map window which leads to confusion. Not
sure about this...Maybe I should...read the ArcGIS documentation on
map units, since there doesn't seem to be much for QGIS...

> > * View > Toogle Full Screen...does not really do what I want. I would
> >   like a way to make the Map Window consume all of QGIS's screen real
> >   estate, hiding any currently floating panels and taking the space of
> >   any docked panels. In the Adobe Creative Suite programs, TAB does
> >   this. Instead, in QGIS, Toggle FS seems to just allow QGIS to use
> >   the 24px normally occupied by my menu bar. Sure, sometimes that
> >   might be handy to do, but not as much as I'd like to be able to see
> >   the full map without all the panels.
> 
> Shift+Tab in QGIS 3.0 will hide all dock panels and give the map all the
> screen space.

That sounds like it's exactly the funcionality I'm seeking, yes.
I'm curious what Tab is bound to and why Shift-Tab is used (but
I should just try out 3.0 and find out!).

> I quite like the idea that Visual Studio has with Full-Screen and
> Presentation Mode which do different things
> Maybe we can use that style of full screening.

Well, I'm not entirely sure what it would mean for QGIS?
Hiding panels is one thing, Hiding the Menu bar and Dock (OSX)...seems
a lot less useful. I guess it's helpful when presenting on a video
projector where you want everything as big as possible and screen rela estate
is precious...anyhow, not complaining, jsut unsure.

> > * Apparently double-clicking on a layer can be configured to do
> >   different things (Open Layer Properties, Open attribute table; Open
> >   Layer Styling Dock)? This is a bit strange. It seems that it should
> >   do one thing only, and there shouldn't be a preference to change it
> >   so radically.
> 

> They are options mainly because people wanted them to do different
> things,

I think the UI desire here is really strong. People be able to access
these 3 different functinos via clicking, because clicking is the 
primary way to access layer selection.  I really think access via
click-with-modifier is important, because click-then-keypress
is much slower and less convenient than cmd/ctrl-click or
option/alt-click. 

> however part of the move into 3.0 is to remove options like this
> because it confusing for training, and IMO we just need to do one
> thing and not have options for every moving part.

I agree its not great to have options that change UI behavior like this.

> Functions keys are using a far bit in other platforms, I'm
> generaelly not a fan of Apple moving people way from them for this
> reason however it's still a valid point and you should still have
> good shortcuts on each platform.

Fan or not, it's definitely a reality (and then there are laptops with
a touchbar instead of function keys...). 

Re: [Qgis-user] My first weekend with QGIS (UI)

[John Hawkinson]

By the way, can anyone here send me a mantra for osgeo registration?
(No reply following https://www.osgeo.org/cgi-bin/ldap_create_user.py)

Nyall Dawson  wrote on Tue, 24 Jan 2017
at 16:39:49 +1000 in 
:

> First off - thanks for taking the time to do this. This kind of
> feedback is invaluable to us as a project, and infinitely more useful
> than a "QGIS is frustrating!1!!" twitter post.

You're welcome! I definitely want to contribute to the project and make
it better. Only replying to the spots where you had questions.

> >   I guess that means I'd like a tooltip delay preference in QGIS (in
> >   the development branch with Qt 5 support), or I suppose a general
> >   mechanism in Qt for overriding the tooltip delay.
> 
> I'm -1 to adding options in the GUI for settings like this. It just
> makes the options dialog huge and scary. If it's an issue I'd say we
> should pick a good shorter delay value and hardcode it for the OSX
> build.

I'm not an expert on tooltips (maybe I can find some academic papers),
but my sense is that there is a fundamental conflict that is
irreconcilable: the more complicated an application, the more having
a faster tooltip is important for letting new user learn it. But the
more experienced you are in an application, the more annoying tooltips
are, and the slower you want them to be. So I suspect that getting
the tooltips fast enough to be good for new users is going to make
them atoo annoying for experienced users.

But when I get some time to sit down with the QGIS 3 / Qt 5 build (Qt
4 didn't support adjustable tooltips), I'll try to evaluate this. 

I do think worrying about making the Options dialog big and scary is
kind of unfair. QGIS already has a *lot* of options, one more isn't
going to break the bank. And if this was a real concern, you could
throw it under Advanced.

Although that's a little counterproductive since the entire point of
the adjustment would be to cater to new users. Although I suppose
the default could be new-user-speed and only advanced users could
slwo it down.

> > * The "Step up" and "Step down" functions (e.g. up/down arrows for
> >   adjusting the point size of fonts or width of strokes/outlines,
> >   etc.) are sometimes scaled inadequately.
> 
> This annoys me too - can you let me know specifics and I'll address
> them. I try to fix each one as I find it, but often forget...

I think Nathan misunderstood me, since he referenced widget padding.
I didn't mean the visual appearance (scale) of the arrow widgets,
I meant the default quantum of adjustment.

Specifically if I have text in as "10 point" and I switch the
adjustment to map units, "10 map unit" text is unreadably small.
In this particular test, which is the alaska.shp from the sample
dataset, it shows at scale 1:17,433,906 and magnification 100%.
To get the text readable, it has to be 10,000 map units. 

I would have to click the up arrow tens of thousands of time to get to
a point where it is visible. I'm not sure what the right solution here
ismaybe the arrows for map units should go at logarithmic scales?

Also, is something wrong with this shapefile that it shows up at
such a huge scale factor? It's much larger (17 million) than the biggest
scale factor in the scale factor dropdown (1 million).

> > * The default font is Helvetica, which is fine, but for some reason
> >   QGIS won't show me any subfaces of Helvetica by default. If I switch
> >   to another font and then switch back to Helvetica, then I am given
> >   the proper face choices (Light, Regular, Oblique, ). Something's
> >   wrong with the font selection defaults (perhaps in Qt?)
> 
> I can't reproduce this - it may be an OSX specific issue. Can you
> outline exact steps to reproduce?

It probably is OSX-specific.
Trivial to reproduce, and seems to happen in ~all cases, but here's one:
New Project; Add Vector Layer: airports.shp; Layer styling: Labelling;
Show labels for this layer; Label with NAME.

The font shown is Helvatica, but the face dropdown is empty.  Switch
to Helvetica Neue, the dropdown is populated.  Switch back to
Helvetica, it's populated (and the defauilt is Light Oblique).

> > . Cmd-shift-V does something very different in the Print Composer --
> >   Paste in Place instead of Add Vector Layer. I can kind of see why
> >   this might be happening, but the idea of having totally different
> >   keybindings in differnt windows of the same application seems pretty
> >   novel. And novelty in UI design results in confusion more often than
> >   not.
> 
> In this case I'd rather leave the composer shortcut and change the
> main app shortcut. Ctrl+Shift+V is a common shortcut used across many
> apps for paste in place.

I agree it's common for Paste-In-Place. But I also suspect more QGIS
users use it for Add Vector Layer. Also this is not a huge deal -- I think
it is an example of novelty and that novelty breeds 

Re: [Qgis-user] My first weekend with QGIS (documentation)

[John Hawkinson]

(I'm kind of regretting not having numbered my items instead of bulleting
them. There was some rationale, something about not wanting to seem imposing
and also that I wanted to maybe sort them before sending the email...didn't
quite work out that way...)

Thanks, by the way, everyone for being so welcoming. I'll have more to
say on harder stuff later (esp. Nathan's super-detailed reply!), but 
there's some low-hanging fruit here. Replies inline below.


Harrissou DelazJ  wrote on Sat, 21 Jan 2017
at 20:26:09 +0100 in 
:

> Doc writing instructions are available at
> http://docs.qgis.org/2.14/en/docs/documentation_guidelines/ and the
> team is present if needed.

Thanks. Here, have a (super-boring) pull request to correct
minor items in the documentation-writing documentation.
"It's turtles all the way down."

> > * Where the are the QGIS 2.18.3 release notes? They are not easy to
> >   find from the website. It's easy to get to
> >   http://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/visualchangelog218/index.html
> >   but that doesn't cover the "dot" releases. Other links take you to
> >   http://hub.qgis.org/projects/quantum-gis
> >   which is not so helpful, at least not directly.

> Weird, whick links sent you there?

Good question...So, the banner at the bottom of the Recent Projects
sends me to http://download.qgis.org (but it's not a clickable link, boo),
aka http://www.qgis.org/en/site/forusers/download.html
which doesn't really have much of a reference to changelogs.
The "All Downloads" link does have a link to Visaual Changelogs,
though I think that's not how I got there.

About QGIS > About > QGIS Code Branch
  links to https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/tree/release-2_18 which is not
  helpful for new users...that wasn't it.

About QGIS > About QGIS Home Page
  goes to http://qgis.org/en/site/ which prominently features 2.18 and a link
  to the Visual Changelog. That's definitely one place.

About QGIS > What's New
  doesn't talk about "dot" releases, but does talk about 2.18.

Help > Check QGIS VErsion
  has 
  "Details on changes can be found by examining the Activity in
  Redmine at http://hub.qgis.org/projects/quantum-gis;
  That's probably the path I used.

And the visual changelog link on the main QGIS webpage, either via
the About QGIS link or just by going to the web page.



> * CRS on first reference. On p.32 is the first time it talks about
...
> > Agreed again (should be easily fixed) but keep in mind that documentation
> is an iterative work, not really linear and we unfortunately do not keep
> eyes on first appearance of expressions. Maybe this is technically
> feasible.

Well, periodically somebody should sit down and read the manual
from cover-to-cover to make sure it "works." Definitely not a high-priority.

> > * Section 8.5 Blending modes doesn't put "soft light" in boldface like
> >   the others.
> >
> > Not sure I understand what you mean. Looks the same afaics.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/qgis/QGIS-Documentation/master/source/docs/user_manual/introduction/general_tools.rst

* Soft light: This is very similar to overlay, but instead of using
  multiply/screen it uses color burn/dodge. This is supposed to
  emulate shining a soft light on to an image.

* **Hard light**: Hard light is also very similar to the overlay
  mode. It's supposed to emulate projecting a very intense light onto
  an image.

Note the lack of ** around "Soft light."


> > * Through the manual, settings are accessed via "Settings". But under
> >   OS X, you get there with QGIS > Preferences...
> >
> > I think it's also accessible through Settings menu under os x (no mac
> available right now to check).

Yes, you're right. One thing in two places is inherently a little confusing,
so maybe there's not much to do about it.

> > * Ctrl-$foo under Win/Linux is Cmd-$foo under OS X. The manual should
> >   acknowledge this somewhere, though maybe not everytime. (But maybe
> >   it should everytime? Because Macs do have Ctrl keys and they are
> >   available but do something slightly different. So...)
> >
> right! This should become a reflex for writers to not confuse mac users.

Well, it's definitely true that the manual becomes kind of ugly
when if it says "Ctrl/Cmd" everywhere. Another choice is to make
platform-specific builds of the manual. I dunno...

> > * Sec. 4.1, View Data, talks about WMS and WFS without expanding or
> >   explaining them.
> >
> > . Maybe this is an unfair criticism because it does the same for OGR
> >   and ESRI, as well as SDTS and JPEG. But none of those bother me?
> >
> > A glossary?

Well, maybe. But in practice few people are going to read a glossary,
and they can Google if they really want to know. The value of having it
on the first reference is to make it accessible with low-effort.
But it may not be worth the cost, and as I said, I'm not sure why
it botehrs me for WMS and WFS but not OGR and ESRI. Though 

Re: [Qgis-user] My first weekend with QGIS.

[DelazJ]

(mistakenly sent a previous unfinished message. sorry!)

Hi,
Wow Very impressive and detailed comments! I like that. You had a full
weekend... Sometimes we are used to the way things behave (even if wrong)
so that some fixes could be postponed or neglected. Having this kind of
reminds from a new user is really useful.

I'm not a developer per se so I let devs react on their side. But on a
general side, I feel that there are some of these issues reported in
http://hub.qgis.org. But a recall is still worthy. Others are also already
fixed in the upcoming 3.0 or being addressed (give a look to
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pulls for improvements). Also note that while
the UX mailing list has been closed for the reason Anita exposed, we had
opened a repository to collect all UI/UX issues that should be addressed
before 3.0 release. Inputs are welcome so Feel free to complete the list at
https://github.com/qgis/qgis3_UIX_discussion/issues

As a Doc team member, I'll rather comment that side of your message. As
Nathan pointed out, this is mainly currently written by volunteers, on
their free time and we are still looking for contributors:
- No need to be a QGIS expert: simply know what you are writing about
- No need to be English native (none of us is currently but one would be
very welcome) nor a novelist: together, we'll try to fix and write the
"best" english possible
- No need to know all the documentation structure nor contents: if you feel
some information is missing at some place, just report it or, better,
propose your help to add it. Otherwise, new features to add to the
documentation are listed at
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Documentation/issues; pick the one you wish to
document and go ahead.
Doc writing instructions are available at
http://docs.qgis.org/2.14/en/docs/documentation_guidelines/ and the team is
present if needed.
The qgis-community mailing-list is also a good place to discuss
documentation matters.

This was an *overall call for documentation contributors*.

Back to your comments, John, As I earlier said, i welcome your comments
because we are all nose to the grindstone and sometimes do not see some
obvious issues.
While I agree that dev list is the best place to discuss fix matters, I'm
glad to see this report here


* DOCUMENTATION ISSUES:
>
> * Where the are the QGIS 2.18.3 release notes? They are not easy to
>   find from the website. It's easy to get to
>   http://qgis.org/en/site/forusers/visualchangelog218/index.html
>   but that doesn't cover the "dot" releases. Other links take you to
>   http://hub.qgis.org/projects/quantum-gis
>   which is not so helpful, at least not directly.
>

Weird, whick links sent you there?

>   Is there nothing more user-friednly than the ChangeLog? If not, at least
>   someting should link to the ChangeLog:
>   https://raw.githubusercontent.com/qgis/QGIS/
> 382e70ed98ba7b498d9501c0746ff81cfb958611/ChangeLog
>
> Agreed. There should be a link to the changelog available. This is a
frequent request.


> % After I drafted the outline that led to many of the issues in this
>   email, I figured I had best go through the QGIS documentation to see
>   if I was missing anything totally obvious, and to give it a similar
>   level of review. I think my patience for doing so fell off
>   exponentially after the first 100 pages, however. And this is
>   against the QGIS 2.14 PDF (sorry).
>
>
* CRS on first reference. On p.32 is the first time it talks about
>   a CRS, but never explains it is a reference system. Acronyms should
>   be expanded on first reference (and possibly more than that in a
>   manual prone to random-access use.)
>
> Agreed again (should be easily fixed) but keep in mind that documentation
is an iterative work, not really linear and we unfortunately do not keep
eyes on first appearance of expressions. Maybe this is technically
feasible. Also note that besides the user manual, we have a "Training
manual" and an "Introduction in GIS" documents. But of course these do not
dispense us to explain these expressions.
We recently discussed about a glossary but not easy to build/maintain given
the current striking force.


> * Apple's OS is properly "Mac OS X" shortened to "OS X" not
>   "OSX". (But I guess they're trying to rebrand as macOS). Docs
>   should be consistent and use "OS X" everywhere, not "OSX" sometimes.
>
> Easy fix

> * The use of the X symbol for |osx| is not a good choice, I fear.
>   http://docs.qgis.org/testing/en/_images/osx.png
>   It's nonstandard, it's doesn't trigger "Mac" in most people's minds.
>   And worse, it does seem extremely reminscent of the X windows X.
>   Probably that doesn't confuse Linux people who are tied to their
>   penguin, but us old-timey non-Linux Unix/X11 people kind of cringe.
>   Compare with https://www.x.org/wiki/logo.png
>   I think a better symbol would be Apple's apple logo
>   https://developer.apple.com/favicon.ico
>   I'm sure that'd be fair use, also...
>
> I've been puzzled by this 

Re: [Qgis-user] My first weekend with QGIS.

[DelazJ]

 Hi,
Wow Very impressive and detailed comments! I like that. You had a full
weekend... Sometimes we are used to the way things behave (even if wrong)
so that some fixes could be postponed or neglected. Having this kind of
reminds from a new user is really useful.

I'm not a developer per se so I let devs react on their side. But on a
general side, I feel that there are some of these issues reported in
http://hub.qgis.org. But a recall is still worthy. Others are also already
fixed in the upcoming 3.0 or being addressed (give a look to
https://github.com/qgis/QGIS/pulls for improvements). Also note that while
the UX mailing list has been closed for the reason Anita exposed, we had
opened a repository to collect all UI/UX issues that should be addressed
before 3.0 release. Inputs are welcome so Feel free to complete the list at
https://github.com/qgis/qgis3_UIX_discussion/issues

As a Doc team member, I'll rather comment that side of your message. As
Nathan pointed out, this is mainly currently written by volunteers, on
their free time and we are still looking for contributors:
- No need to be a QGIS expert: simply know what you are writing about
- No need to be English native (none of us is currently but one would be
very welcome) nor a novelist: together, we'll try to fix and write the
"best" english possible
- No need to know all the documentation structure nor contents nol
***

While I agree that dev list is the best place to discuss fix matters, I'm
glad to see this report here

Thanks for your contribution and looking forward to fixing/discussing them
with you on mailing lists, or bug trackers.


Envoyé depuis mon HTC

- Reply message -
De : "Nathan Woodrow" <madman...@gmail.com>
Pour : "John A Hawkinson" <jh...@mit.edu>
Cc : "qgis-user" <qgis-user@lists.osgeo.org>, "qgis-developer@lists.osgeo.
org" <qgis-develo...@lists.osgeo.org>
Objet : [Qgis-user] My first weekend with QGIS.
Date : sam., janv. 21, 2017 11:20

Hey John,

First thanks for the feedback. Glad to see your first experience wasn't too
bad despite the issues that you run into.

You are right that this is best sent to the dev list as that is where we
all hang out, the user email is mainly for end users who may or may not be
involved in the development.  I will forward this to the dev list for more
feedback for you.

Splitting this up into features/bugs and into the right categories is
definitely the right way to go forward but as you said sometimes it's best
to just get it out first.  To make these actionable I suggest you turn them
into tickets whenever you have the chance.

Also be aware of the iceberg issue here and that small things might be
massive under the hood which can explain why things are the way they are.
Good news is that we are getting stronger as a dev team, Qt5 is really
good, so things are getting much better as we evolve.

With that said here is some feedback on your feedback (removed some just
because I don't think I need to comment on everything, we can do that on
the tickets.):

> * Pixelated app-icon.

Known issues. Should be a ticket and a PR that will hopefully resolve it
for 3.0 and backported.

* Tool icons don’t show keyboard shortcuts on hover (tooltips).

> Main reason for this is that tooltips are hardcoded in the UI files,
however,
> shortcuts are set in the app itself.  This could be fixed pretty easy I
think
> by just looping all actions and adding shortcut text.


* Tooltips are too slow for beginning users.

> I suspect this is just a OS X thing as on Windows they show really quick.
> One of the devs with OS X might have to look into that one.


* Undo is very limited. For instance.
>
>
> Good thing is that adding undo is easy thanks to Qt.  Styling has a
(almost) unlimited undo stack,
> as well as editing.  We do need to add undo in other places so it's just
a matter of time really and
> knowing the places too put them.  There isn't just one big undo stack for
the whole application because
> that would mean you could undo edit changes when you really wanted to
undo a layer group add, etc.


So it just needs some thought

> * Keyboard shortcut configuration is broken.


> . As a prelude, the first time you open the Configure Shortcuts


This should be fixed in 3.0 as Alex did some recent changes there.

> . It displays the wrong modifier for OS X. E.g. Add Vector Layer is
>   Cmd-Shift-V, but it is displayed as Ctrl-Shift-V.


This might be a Qt thing as we use it for handling shortcuts. But unsure
>
>
> . Not broken, but it sure would be nice to be able to export a
>   shortcut set to a text file so you could search through it in a text
>   editor.


3.0 will have shortcut search. Export would be easy enough to add I suspect.

> * Left keyboard arrow inside a hierarchical list (such as in a Layer
>   Group in the Layers panel, but many othe

Re: [Qgis-user] My first weekend with QGIS.

[Nathan Woodrow]

Hey John,

First thanks for the feedback. Glad to see your first experience wasn't too
bad despite the issues that you run into.

You are right that this is best sent to the dev list as that is where we
all hang out, the user email is mainly for end users who may or may not be
involved in the development.  I will forward this to the dev list for more
feedback for you.

Splitting this up into features/bugs and into the right categories is
definitely the right way to go forward but as you said sometimes it's best
to just get it out first.  To make these actionable I suggest you turn them
into tickets whenever you have the chance.

Also be aware of the iceberg issue here and that small things might be
massive under the hood which can explain why things are the way they are.
Good news is that we are getting stronger as a dev team, Qt5 is really
good, so things are getting much better as we evolve.

With that said here is some feedback on your feedback (removed some just
because I don't think I need to comment on everything, we can do that on
the tickets.):

> * Pixelated app-icon.

Known issues. Should be a ticket and a PR that will hopefully resolve it
for 3.0 and backported.

* Tool icons don’t show keyboard shortcuts on hover (tooltips).

> Main reason for this is that tooltips are hardcoded in the UI files,
however,
> shortcuts are set in the app itself.  This could be fixed pretty easy I
think
> by just looping all actions and adding shortcut text.


* Tooltips are too slow for beginning users.

> I suspect this is just a OS X thing as on Windows they show really quick.
> One of the devs with OS X might have to look into that one.


* Undo is very limited. For instance.
>
>
> Good thing is that adding undo is easy thanks to Qt.  Styling has a
(almost) unlimited undo stack,
> as well as editing.  We do need to add undo in other places so it's just
a matter of time really and
> knowing the places too put them.  There isn't just one big undo stack for
the whole application because
> that would mean you could undo edit changes when you really wanted to
undo a layer group add, etc.


So it just needs some thought

> * Keyboard shortcut configuration is broken.


> . As a prelude, the first time you open the Configure Shortcuts


This should be fixed in 3.0 as Alex did some recent changes there.

> . It displays the wrong modifier for OS X. E.g. Add Vector Layer is
>   Cmd-Shift-V, but it is displayed as Ctrl-Shift-V.


This might be a Qt thing as we use it for handling shortcuts. But unsure
>
>
> . Not broken, but it sure would be nice to be able to export a
>   shortcut set to a text file so you could search through it in a text
>   editor.


3.0 will have shortcut search. Export would be easy enough to add I suspect.

> * Left keyboard arrow inside a hierarchical list (such as in a Layer
>   Group in the Layers panel, but many other places) does not move the
>   selection up one level of hierarchy to the parent, nor does it close
>   the open layer group. It should do one of those things. Is this a Qt
issue?


Works for me on Windows. Left will move up one and close children. Up arrow
just moves up.
This is default Qt tree widgets most of the time.

> * There apppears to be no indication of which subwindow/pane has the
>   keyboard focus.


Styling is all handling by Qt and is based on OS.  We can override it with
theming but that also
has mixed results.  Just needs more digging.
>
>
> . Although there is a blue highlight around a currently active widget,


Handled by Qt for now.
>
>
> . The title bar of the currently active panel should change somehow to
>   indicate it is active. And there should be some related mechanism
>   for the Map Window.


See Qt comment for now.

> * There is no no keyboard shortcut to switch between panels, at least
>   when the panels are docked.


I have thought about this before.  It's easy to do just need to work out a
good
workflow for the shortcuts that makes sense. I have thought about
Ctrl+1,2,3,4 etc but
unsure

> . After undocking a panel from the main window, keyboard panel
>   navigation is...borked. Cmd-` ought to cycle through an
>   application's windows, but it half-works. If a floating panel is
>   selected, Cmd-` moves focus to the main window. But another Cmd-`
>   does not move it back, nor does Cmd-Shift-` (which should cycle in
>   the other direction through the ring of all windows).


Might be a Qt issue? Also at times if you don't parent a window correctly
you can
get strange results.

> * The project's filename is not properly displayed in the window's
>   title bar using the OS mechanism. That means there is no icon next
>   to the filename, and and you cannot Cmd-click on the titlebar to
>   open the enclosing folder in the Finder.


Might also be a Qt thing as some things are not exposed to use to changed.
However there
has been work to have out own wrapper to underlying OS APIs in order to
access things Qt doesn't wrap.
Might be solvable but unsure.

Re: [Qgis-user] My first weekend with QGIS.

[Anita Graser]

>
> Il 21/01/2017 10:00, Alessandro Pasotti ha scritto:
> > There was also a UX mailing list, but I'm not sure if that is still
> active.
>

​The UX list was retired because most threads were duplicated on the dev
list or simply off topic.

Anita
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Re: [Qgis-user] My first weekend with QGIS.

[Paolo Cavallini]

Hi John,
agreed, a lot of very useful requests. I'm sure many developers will be
interested, so please write to qgis-dev too. Please do come aboard and
let's work together, lots of room for improvement here. We are aware
polishing is something we have to work on, and I believe the QGIS 3
transition is the best possible moment to do it.
All the best.

Il 21/01/2017 10:00, Alessandro Pasotti ha scritto:
> Wow: what an impressive review!
> Thanks for sending your notes, I've only read them quickly and I'd
> suggest you to file individual tickets for each bug/feature-request and
> discuss the other points one by one (or grouped when strictly related).
> 
> 
> Some of the brightest QGIS devs are using Mac: I'm pretty sure that
> you'll soon see a lot of improvements in that area.
>  
> There was also a UX mailing list, but I'm not sure if that is still active.
> 
> On Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 1:26 AM, John A Hawkinson  > wrote:
> 
> Hi, all. I spent last weekend learning to use QGIS, and as a result I
> have a fair amount of feedback. On the whole I'm quite impressed,
> especially when I want back to check some things in ArcMap afterwards
> on Tuesday; but there are also a lot of areas that seem to lack
> polish.
> 
> 
> [.]
>  
> 
> 
> 
> And that's all, folks.
> If you made it here, you get a special prize!
> 
> --jh...@mit.edu 
>   John Hawkinson
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> 
> 
> 
> -- 
> Alessandro Pasotti
> w3:   www.itopen.it 
> 
> 
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-- 
Paolo Cavallini - www.faunalia.eu
QGIS & PostGIS courses: http://www.faunalia.eu/training.html
https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all=IT=qgis,arcgis
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Re: [Qgis-user] My first weekend with QGIS.

[Alessandro Pasotti]

Wow: what an impressive review!
Thanks for sending your notes, I've only read them quickly and I'd suggest
you to file individual tickets for each bug/feature-request and discuss the
other points one by one (or grouped when strictly related).


Some of the brightest QGIS devs are using Mac: I'm pretty sure that you'll
soon see a lot of improvements in that area.

There was also a UX mailing list, but I'm not sure if that is still active.

On Sat, Jan 21, 2017 at 1:26 AM, John A Hawkinson  wrote:

> Hi, all. I spent last weekend learning to use QGIS, and as a result I
> have a fair amount of feedback. On the whole I'm quite impressed,
> especially when I want back to check some things in ArcMap afterwards
> on Tuesday; but there are also a lot of areas that seem to lack
> polish.
>
>
[.]


> 
>
> And that's all, folks.
> If you made it here, you get a special prize!
>
> --jh...@mit.edu
>   John Hawkinson
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> Qgis-user@lists.osgeo.org
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-- 
Alessandro Pasotti
w3:   www.itopen.it
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[Qgis-user] My first weekend with QGIS.

[John A Hawkinson]

Hi, all. I spent last weekend learning to use QGIS, and as a result I
have a fair amount of feedback. On the whole I'm quite impressed,
especially when I want back to check some things in ArcMap afterwards
on Tuesday; but there are also a lot of areas that seem to lack
polish.

I took some notes along the way, which have turned into this email
(which it took me all week to get finish writing up...oops!).
But I expect the proper thing to do is to file bugs for all of them
(assuming they are not duplicative) and then start submitting pull
requests on Github to address them, at least where doing so is within
my means. If there's a better path, I hope someone will let me know.
I realize some of these issues may by GDAL or Qt 4.8 or other issues
outside the scope of the QGIS project directly.

I realize this email is way too long for anyone to reasonably go
through. So I look at it more as an exercise for myself to put my
thoughts in order before filing bugs. If someone has a better
approach, please let me know. My goal is to contribute productively
to the project. (I'm not sure that splitting it up into 10 seperate
emails for each category would be productive?)

Also, if this is more appropriate for qgis-developer@, please let me
know that, too.

Since I began last Saturday, I did this against QGIS 2.18.2, using
William Kyngesburye's builds installed via Homebrew. Although I
realize 2.18.3 came out this week. (From a brief glance at the release
notes -- hard to find! -- it doesn't look like any of the changes are
pertinent). I also belatedly realized I was using 2.14 manual, and I
have a bunch of documenation comments, but the few I spot-checked
remain issues in the github repo.

I am not really a GIS person, but I am a data person and a programmer,
albiet not a GUI programmer. I last used ArcMap abortively a few years
ago, and I don't have much experience with Qt. My platform of choice
is Mac OS X. I also have a lot of experience with Adobe InDesign,
which maybe has a similarly complex UI to that of QGIS, although I
think it has a tronger UI history. I also have very occasional
experience with complex UIs like Pro-Engineer, Autocad, etc.

That means I have a number of opinions about how software should work,
and some of the places where QGIS departs from the OS's expectations
are things that bother me. It might well be that the QGIS developers
disagree with me on some points...which is totally fine; my opinions
may be Wrong(tm). Some of these may be Mac-specific, although since
QGIS allows selecting a system UI Style, it's fine to do Mac-specific
things in the Aqua style.

I welcome your feedback and I'm happy to contribute to the project.

My platform was a 13" Retina MacBook Pro (OS X 10.10.5), with its
built-in trackpad (no mouse), which also colors some of my thoughts on
UI issues.

I've tried to sort these into (loose) categories:

GENERAL UI ISSUES   ATTRIBUTES WINDOW
LAYERS PANELOTHER WINDOWS
LAYER STYLING   ACTUAL FUNCTIONALITY
MENUS   QUESTIONS
MAP WINDOW TOOLSBUGS

*'s are big bullet points, . are smaller issues, and %'s are non-issue
comments along the way.




GENERAL UI ISSUES:

* Pixelated app-icon. The very first thing I notice is the QGIS
  application icon is pixelated, as seen when switching apps with
  Cmd-TAB. This is kind of off-putting from the start -- first
  impressions are importnat.  I guess the icon is getting replaced
  anyhow, but this is probably just an actual bug/failure to install
  the right icon in the right place. The Finder (e.g. Get Info on the
  app) properly displays a hi-rez icon for QGIS.

* Tool icons don’t show keyboard shortcuts on hover (tooltips). When
  learning any complicated application, it's important to be able learn
  the keyboard shortcuts quickly and easily. One of the best ways is
  the tooltip. But QGIS's tooltips in its toolbars don't show keyboard
  shortcuts (except in the Attirbutes window, see below).

* Tooltips are too slow for beginning users. I don't know if they're
  appropriate for experienced users (tooltips are a horrible UI for
  anything. But unfortunately we don't really have a better one out
  there for mastering a GUI). Clasically under OS X you can adjust
  the tooltip delay by hand for Cocoa applications. E.g.:

 defaults write org.qgis.QGIS2 NSInitialToolTipDelay -int 100

  Unfortunately that doesn't work for QGIS, presumably because it is
  Qt-based. It looks like Qt 5 adds configurable tooltip durations
  http://doc.qt.io/qt-5/qwidget.html#toolTipDuration-prop
  but it doesn't sound like there's a good application-independent way
  to configure it.

  I guess that means I'd like a tooltip delay preference in QGIS (in
  the development branch with Qt 5 support), or I suppose a general
  mechanism in Qt for overriding the tooltip delay. But I think
  there's