[Ifeffit] User interface question for Demeter

[Bruce Ravel]

Scott,

I think I am flattered that you have mistaken laziness for philosophy.
I think I will stick with that in the future.  Whenever there is a
feature that seems to be absent from my software, then all users
should assume there is a deep philosophical reason for its absence.  I
am such a very deep fellow, after all!



Silliness aside, I am fully aware that the various lists in Artemis
need the ability to be reordered.  It just hasn't been implemented in
any serious way.  There really isn't a compelling reason other than
that no one had yet complained about it.

I had, in fact, never considered resorting path lists in the way you
suggest.  That's an interesting idea.

I'll bump all this up on the to-do list.  It certainly won't be in the
next release, but hopefully the one after.

B

On 07/03/2013 10:38 AM, Scott Calvin wrote:
> 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.

-- 
  Bruce Ravel  ------------------------------------ bravel at bnl.gov

  National Institute of Standards and Technology
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