[Pan-users] Re: Some remarks about the user interface

[Duncan]

Rhialto <address@hidden> posted
address@hidden, excerpted below, on  Thu, 28 Sep 2006
00:14:00 +0200:

> Hi all,
> 
> I've been compiling the last few beta versions of Pan for NetBSD, and I
> started to use it too. I have some remarks about things in the user
> interface that are in my view a step backwards compared to the 0.14
> series. The latest version I tried was 0.113. 0.114 is compiling now.
> 
> - Drag-select doesn't work anymore even though it is a basic GUI
>   concept. This is very inconvenient, I would call it a showstopper.

Perhaps, but otherwise selection works better.  With 0.14.x, either mouse
selection or keyboard selection could work, but not both, due apparently
to interaction with a bug in the gtk widget used in the header/overview
pane (early versions had keyboard selection working but not mouse
selection, later ones had mouse selection working but not keyboard, IIRC).
Now, both work, including shift-click (range select), ctrl-click
(multi-select), and keyboard selection (shift and ctrl with up/down arrows
and space).

I'm not sure if the lack of drag select now is related or simply that you
are the first to ask for it.  As long as implementing it doesn't kill
any of the above select modes, I'd say fine, but if it does, leave it the
way things are. 

> - If you choose a primary newsserver and one or more secondaries, you
>   get duplicate articles, so you can't just select a range of articles
>   to download because it will download too much. This is very
>   inconvenient, I would call it a showstopper.

That was a bug that should be fixed in 0.114, I believe.  Least-wise,
something like that was in the fix list and I had seen it before but not
since (with newly downloaded overviews, old ones don't get fixed).

> - How are the different (primary) newsservers related anyway? I can't
>   seem to choose between them or anything.

You don't choose between them in the UI.  It's a single group listing and
single post display -- unified management.  However, you can set
priorities, so for instance pan will go to low/no-cost servers first, and
only try the premium servers if it can't find the posts on the first set. 
For simplicity, the GUI config only shows two levels of priority (in
server settings), but you can edit the servers.xml file directly to any
number of priorities.  There are a number of other no-gui config-options
available as well (including the $PAN_HOME environmental variable,
allowing multiple sessions with different settings or simply allowing you
to place pan's working dir as desired). I list about six of them in a
post from last week.

> - I'd like my times expressed in 24 hour format please.

Actually, I would too. =8^)  It may be settable using GNOME config
options, but I use KDE and don't have GNOME installed, so couldn't say. 
I'd certainly like this to be customizable, tho, so I agree with this one.
Please file a bug.  If you post the bug URL after you do, I'll follow up
seconding the request.  I'm not sure if this will make it before 1.0,
however.  Probably depends on the pain and potential bugginess of
implementation, which means it's not likely to get a GUI option pre-1.0
anyway, tho it might get a direct file edit config option.

> - If I "Save articles" I always get the ^***&*& dialog, instead of just
>   saving the attachments in the default directory as set for the group.
>   Worse, the dialog has the wrong pre-selection, it always selects
>   "custom path" even if I previously selected "Group's default path".

The pre-selection thing is already bugged and there have been some
changes of late tho I don't think it's fully fixed yet.  Read the list
archives (or subscribe to the gmane.org newsgroup and read it there) or
check bugzi for the details.  There has been discussion about bringing back
the no-dialog version, and I believe everybody incl. Charles believes it's
a good idea, but I'm not sure it'll make it before 1.0.  FWIW, if you do
/not/ set a default save location (I believe you have to edit the config
manually to remove it if set, however, tho you can set it to something
else, but that's not the same), the dialog remembers the last used location
and it seems to work better. That helps a GREAT deal here.  Along with
range- and multi-select as above, that makes things not /too/ bad, tho a
non-dialog method would be even better.

> - There isn't even a "Group's default path" option in the dialog if you
>   didn't set something for the group; there is apparently not a global
>   default path. 

There's a global default, but I believe it has to be set manually now.  A
few versions ago there was no per-group setting, so the global default was
all there was.

> - In the "task list" I can't see with which server a task is associated,
>   which is inconvenient in case of very slow fallback servers for
>   instance.

The tasks are server-global, not associated with any particular server. 
However, it /would/ be nice if pan were to have some method, perhaps a
column in the overview/header pane, to show which servers had a particular
post and how complete it was on the various servers.  The task dialog
could then show which server the various connections were for, maybe with
separate columns for each server displaying the active connections. 
However, this is all post-1.0 stuff, since 1.0 is very close now.

> - Something which is not really Pan's problem but of the posters: if
>   there are multiple numbered posts with the numbers near the start of
>   the Subject rather than near the end, all the [01/40] articles are
>   grouped together even if they don't belong together.

Old-pan ignored those for sorting order IIRC.  Maybe new-pan should do the
same?  Please file a bug, tho again this might be a post-1.0 thing.


-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman