[Ifeffit] User interface question for Demeter

[Scott Calvin]

Hi Bruce,

I and my group have finally started using Demeter Artemis, and in general it's wonderful. But there's one aspect of the user interface philosophy that I'm either not getting or finding clunky.

In Horae, it was sometimes possible to rearrange the order of lists. For example, the list of groups in Athena could be rearranged by moving groups up and down, while the list of parameters in the GDS screen could be rearranged by using the "move" option.

I'm not really finding that functionality in Demeter. The GDS screen does allow copying, but that requires a multiple-step process for a move. And I don't see a way to rearrange the order of groups in Athena at all. In addition, there's a new place where this kind of functionality would be helpful but appears to be lacking: the path list in the Data window. Since that list is now populated by drag-and-drop, it can end up in some pretty oddball orders.

Am I just not grokking some UI feature that lets the user rearrange the order of lists? Dragging, for instance, doesn't seem to work. Or are there other features I should be using that make the order of those lists relatively unimportant? Or is ordering lists something that will appear in future versions, but it just hasn't been implemented yet?

If the latter, then I also have a further feature suggestion, although it's not high priority. It would be quite useful if the path list in the Data window could be sorted in various ways, perhaps even with primary and secondary criteria. So, for example, sort by feff calculation, and then by importance. Or by number of legs, and then by Reff. While the marks menu lets us quickly select paths in a number of nifty ways, getting them in order of Reff or importance would be quite effective at cleaning up messy lists.

--Scott Calvin
Sarah Lawrence College