Re: [Flightgear-devel] Weather scenarios - add ICAO standard

[James T. <ja...@fl...>]

> On 19 Apr 2018, at 15:04, Thorsten Renk <tho...@sc...> wrote:
> 
> I have a list of my 25 candidates, I'm seeing four or five at a time, so I need to scroll to get to what I'm looking for, and it's not intuitively clear to me where in the list I want to scroll because the list isn't sorted alphabetically or by any other topic I could figure out  - so I randomly pick a direction to scroll and try to recognize the thumbnail (and read name if I find a thumbnail candidate - i.e. when I'm looking for a helicopter, I scan for helicopter images and then read what the name of the beast is I'm looking at) - which is bad if the aircraft doesn't have one.
> 
> If I'd see more aircraft on-screen, I'd have to scroll less (basically my previous suggestion was to hide all description text in the list and only present thumbnail / name to fit more aircraft on screen - and only show description once the aircraft is selected).
> 
> If the list would be ordered alphabetically (or by any other criterion), I'd also know better where to scroll to.

I typically see 6-8 aircraft per screen and they nearly all have a useful thumbnail which really helps I agree. The aircraft I have from manual downloads with a rather useless ‘logo’ thumbnail are definitely more awkward to deal with. This definitely does highlight to me the important of picking good thumbnails for aircraft since as you observed, it’s the best visual cue.

For the delegate, I’m constrained by the thumbnail size - shrinking the image won’t look good, but I don’t want to word-wrap the titles because mostly that makes them hard to read. (Due to lots of hyphens, model numbers and similar)  So the minimum height is the thumbnail height + the margins between items, which is about what we have now. I’ll have a think if there is any further trimming possible, though.

About the sorting, the list is supposed to be sorted alphabetically, but it’s not working at the moment, so we’re getting the scan order, which is ‘partially alphabetical’ and hence I didn’t notice (the parse order for both the official hangar and on-disk dirs in the directory listing order, which tends to be alphabetical, but the whole list is not being re-sorted as it should, that’s a bug to fix.

Kind regards,
James