Re: Datasheet internals

[John Darrington]

On Tue, Jun 12, 2007 at 09:59:14PM -0700, Ben Pfaff wrote:

     It's been a long time since I've tried out the GUI.  I have to
     say, I'm impressed.  My first surprise was the splash image that
     appeared when I started it up--you (or Patrick Brunier or Dondi
     Bogusky?) must have an artistic streak in you, it's lovely.

The artistic flair is Dondi Boguski's.  I munged his image a little
and put it into the splash code.
     
     A few comments:
     
         It would be nice if the file open dialog boxes kept track of
         the last directory they were in; I often have a directory
         full of system files that I want to open one by one.

I guess that's possible.  Do you want the state to persist between
invocations of the gui or just within the same instance of the
program?  Also, it's not exactly what you're after, but check out the
File->Recently Used Data menuitem.
     
         Only one of View|Data or View|Variables appears on the View
         menu at any given time.  I think putting both on the menu
         with a check mark by the one currently selected would be
         easier to understand.

Possibly.  I did it that way simply to emulate other software.
     
         The Type & Label button in the Compute dialog box becomes
         active when I type the name of a variable that doesn't yet
         exist, but it doesn't do anything when I click on it (perhaps
         it's just not implemented yet).

Correct. It's not implemented yet.
     
         There are some funny buttons to the right of the "weight"
         button on the toolbar.  One is a grayed-out grid symbol,
         another is a check mark, and the third is just blank.  I'm
         not sure what's going on.

Yes.  I think there's a bug in recent Gtk versions that's partly
responsible for this.  I'll look into that when I get the time.
     
         I think that the GUI should accept file names on the command
         line, at least the name of a portable or system file to load
         and maybe the names of syntax files to bring into windows
         also.

I agree.  I hadn't done that, because of 1) time constraints; 2) the
possibilities of what we might want, at some time in the future, to be
specified on the command line are endless. So the protocol needs to
thought out carefully to prevent ambiguities further down the line.
     
         I'm willing to file wishlist bugs on any of these if you
         like.

Please do.
     
     I realize that this isn't the question you were asking; I got
     sidetracked.  I'll get back to the issue at hand tomorrow.  Time
     to sleep now, I've had too many late nights lately.

Thanks for all your hard work.

J'

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