From: Don P. <dpe...@si...> - 2003-08-15 14:43:16
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Hi all, I've been away on vacation for a couple of weeks and am just catching up on the threads. I have a couple thoughts/comments about the new proposals for the Family View. First, I did like the old way of arranging the AP/Spouse & parents, but could probably get used to the top->bottom arrangement. At first, it does make some sense to arrange things in the new way. However, making this change introduces other inconsistencies into GRAMPS. I'm thinking mainly of the Pedigree View. The Pedigree View has the family flowing with ancestors to the right. The current Family View mimics that, with parents to the right. If we make the family view flow top to bottom, then the pedigree view should probably also flow from top to bottom. Now, I've looked at Alex's screenshot (but have not had a chance to download the new glade file and hence actually test the functionality) and find good and bad things. The good is that seeing the top to bottom flow looks nice. The bad is that I no longer have any sense of what the various buttons do in this dialog anymore. In looking at the screenshot, there are too many arrows pointing in too many different directions. Actually, now after studying it for awhile, I think I get some of it. Perhaps the left arrow between the Souse and AP should be a left/right arrow since (I presume) this swaps the Spouse and AP? How does one add a new spouse or child? It also seems weird (visually, not necessarily logically) that there is an up-arrow for the child box, down arrows for parents, but nothing for the active generation. Finally, if someone hits the down-arrow for the spouse's parents, then who becomes the active person? Thanks for listening, -Don -- ________________________________________________ Donald A. Peterson | dpe...@si... Ph.D. Research Associate | Dept. of Chemistry | PH: (541) 737-7079 Oregon St. University | FAX: (541) 737-0480 ------------------------------------------------ |
From: Alex R. <sh...@al...> - 2003-08-15 15:28:25
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On 2003.08.15 09:43, Don Peterson wrote: > At first, it does make some sense to arrange things in the new way. > However, making this change introduces other inconsistencies into > GRAMPS. I'm thinking mainly of the Pedigree View. The Pedigree View > has the family flowing with ancestors to the right. The current Family > View mimics that, with parents to the right. If we make the family view > flow top to bottom, then the pedigree view should probably also flow > from top to bottom. This is a valid cocern, and I don't have an obvious solution. Of course, with the majority of the monitors being wider than taller, the Pedigree View would not be able to display as many generations in the vertical direction. > Now, I've looked at Alex's screenshot (but have not had a chance to > download the new glade file and hence actually test the functionality) > and find good and bad things. The good is that seeing the top to bottom > flow looks nice. The bad is that I no longer have any sense of what the > various buttons do in this dialog anymore. Actually, they do same things mostly. If you try the glade file, you'll find the tooltips very handy, I'm sure. > ... Perhaps the left arrow between the Souse and AP should be a > left/right arrow since (I presume) this swaps the Spouse and AP? I was thinking same way too, initially. But then it occurred to me that it's not necessarily swapping the spouses, is it? What it actually does is make the currently selected spouse an active person. If _and only if_ that spouse's preferred spouse is the currently active person, will this button swap them. But, imagine when A was married to B anc C, while B was married to A and D with D preferred. Then, when A is active and B is the selected spouse the "swapping" button will make B active and D the selected spouse, not A!!! I think that "swap" is an incorrect description and that the double arrow should be a single arrow. > How does one add a new spouse or child? Same way as before -- by way of using buttons to the right of theor boxes. Tooltips will guide you through, but this has not changed from the previous layout. > It also seems weird (visually, not necessarily logically) that there is an > up-arrow for the child box, down arrows for parents, but nothing for the > active generation. But the active is already in the center! Everything else can be moved to the center using the arrows. > Finally, if someone hits the down-arrow for the spouse's parents, > then who becomes the active person? They do, and I agree that this is visually misleading. The arrow should be pointing south-west instead of south. The more I think about it the more I like the idea of providing two layouts. We can call them FTM-style and Alternative layouts for Family view. Could we do that? Something like having two glade files and selecting one of them based on the prefs setting? Alex -- Alexander Roitman http://ebner.neuroscience.umn.edu/people/alex.html Dept. of Neuroscience, Lions Research Building 2001 6th Street SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455 Tel (612) 625-7566 FAX (612) 626-9201 |
From: Alex R. <sh...@al...> - 2003-08-15 22:47:48
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On 2003.08.15 10:16, Alex Roitman wrote: > > ... Perhaps the left arrow between the Souse and AP should be a > > left/right arrow since (I presume) this swaps the Spouse and AP? > > I was thinking same way too, initially. But then it occurred to me that it's not > necessarily swapping the spouses, is it? What it actually does is make the > currently selected spouse an active person. If _and only if_ that spouse's > preferred spouse is the currently active person, will this button swap them. > But, imagine when A was married to B anc C, while B was married to A > and D with D preferred. Then, when A is active and B is the selected spouse > the "swapping" button will make B active and D the selected spouse, not A!!! It seems that I was wrong and that the actual behavior is actually swapping. > I think that "swap" is an incorrect description and that the double arrow should > be a single arrow. I take this back, sorry. Alex -- Alexander Roitman http://ebner.neuroscience.umn.edu/people/alex.html Dept. of Neuroscience, Lions Research Building 2001 6th Street SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455 Tel (612) 625-7566 FAX (612) 626-9201 |
From: Don A. <dal...@us...> - 2003-08-16 02:46:04
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On Fri, 2003-08-15 at 09:16, Alex Roitman wrote: > The more I think about it the more I like the idea of providing two layouts. > We can call them FTM-style and Alternative layouts for Family view. > Could we do that? Something like having two glade files and selecting one of them > based on the prefs setting? Maintaining two separate glade files would be a major problem, and I would not recommend it. However, we can do something similar. A gtk.Notebook is used to provide the different views. We can add another panel to the notebook (at the end) which implements the alternative interface. We could select the appropriate panel based off the user's choice. We would have to: 1) Make sure all important widgets are named similar, but not identical to the standard view. 2) Make sure all callbacks associated with similar widgets are the same. Based of the users choice, we select the correct panel and widget names. Don -- Don Allingham <dal...@us...> GRAMPS OpenSource Genealogy |
From: Alex R. <sh...@al...> - 2003-08-16 04:23:53
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On Fri, Aug 15, 2003 at 08:40:49PM -0600, Don Allingham wrote: > Maintaining two separate glade files would be a major problem, and I > would not recommend it. That's what I thought at first, but I thought that two glade files is better. Well, I agree that this will bring a lot of problems, so the extra panel is a better alternative. Is it worth the trouble? I didn't get the impression of strong opinions on the list so far. Alex -- Alexander Roitman http://ebner.neuroscience.umn.edu/people/alex.html Dept. of Neuroscience, Lions Research Building 2001 6th Street SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455 Tel (612) 625-7566 FAX (612) 626-9201 |
From: Don A. <dal...@us...> - 2003-08-16 19:23:00
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I think it is worth the trouble. Some people will find one more intuitive than the other, and we can probably do it without too much difficulty. Don On Fri, 2003-08-15 at 21:01, Alex Roitman wrote: > On Fri, Aug 15, 2003 at 08:40:49PM -0600, Don Allingham wrote: > > Maintaining two separate glade files would be a major problem, and I > > would not recommend it. > > That's what I thought at first, but I thought that two glade files is > better. Well, I agree that this will bring a lot of problems, so the > extra panel is a better alternative. > > Is it worth the trouble? I didn't get the impression of strong opinions > on the list so far. > > Alex -- Don Allingham <dal...@us...> GRAMPS OpenSource Genealogy |
From: John S. <jo...@st...> - 2003-08-18 21:10:16
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>>>>> "Don" == Don Allingham <dal...@us...> writes: Don> I think it is worth the trouble. Some people will find one more Don> intuitive than the other, and we can probably do it without too Don> much difficulty. I haven't had a chance to try out the new family view, but I suspect that just having one view which is tweaked to work for most people in an intuitive manner is better in the long run, esp from a support and bug reporting view. Otherwise, you have to ask people which family view they're using, and track updates across both sets of buttons and other widgets to make sure they stay in sync. I'll see what I can do to look at the new version tonight. John |
From: Alex R. <sh...@al...> - 2003-08-18 21:19:26
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On 2003.08.18 16:09, John Stoffel wrote: > >>>>> "Don" == Don Allingham <dal...@us...> writes: > > Don> I think it is worth the trouble. Some people will find one more > Don> intuitive than the other, and we can probably do it without too > Don> much difficulty. > > I haven't had a chance to try out the new family view, but I suspect > that just having one view which is tweaked to work for most people in > an intuitive manner is better in the long run, esp from a support and > bug reporting view. > > Otherwise, you have to ask people which family view they're using, and > track updates across both sets of buttons and other widgets to make > sure they stay in sync. Unfortunatley, there does not seem to be an easy way to determine which one works for most people. As it has been mentioned before, vertical flow of generation makes great sense. At the same time, horizontal layout is very similar to FTM and that is certainly more intuitive for the people who have worked with it. I think there won't be so much support and bug report problems because the frames and most of the buttons will be labeled the same. It's just the layout that is going to change. Alex -- Alexander Roitman http://ebner.neuroscience.umn.edu/people/alex.html Dept. of Neuroscience, Lions Research Building 2001 6th Street SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455 Tel (612) 625-7566 FAX (612) 626-9201 |
From: Alex R. <sh...@al...> - 2003-08-26 11:41:24
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John has raised an important point regarding the default active person when no active person is selected (the database without home person=20 just after having been loaded or any database imported from GEDCOM).=20 I'm forwarding this to the list. This same problem causes the bug 793127.= =20 My personal vote would go for the person with the alphabetically first and non-empty last name.=20 Alex On 2003.08.19 14:35, John Stoffel wrote: > Which reminds me. When I start up 0.9.3 and do NOT select anyone, > then switch to the family view, I don't get anything. Shouldn't there > be a default person selected automatically on startup? I don't care > so much *who* the person is, but at least have someone as the active > person on startup would make sense. And I think I can argue for it > being the person who was the last active person, or maybe even just > the person who is the lowest (or highest) numbered personal ID. --=20 Alexander Roitman http://ebner.neuroscience.umn.edu/people/alex.html Dept. of Neuroscience, Lions Research Building 2001 6th Street SE, Minneapolis, MN 55455 Tel (612) 625-7566 FAX (612) 626-9201 |