User Interface Ideas

From VikingWiki

The following are ideas for Viking's user interface.

Ideas in bold are those one user (Reid) believes are essential for a 1.0 release.

General concepts

• Strive to provide more user feedback about what is going on.

Specific items of potential improvement

• Drag-panning should favor speed in keeping up with the mouse over smoothness.
• Highlight map tiles which are blank but queued for download (say, color them pink).
• Changing zoom level to a large scale (e.g. zoom out 64x) is slow, esp. if you only use the 4x4 meter resolution topos, as I do. This slowness is fine, but I think there ought to be an indicator that Viking is thinking -- the watch cursor, perhaps. I don't think a full-blown percentage bar window is necessary.
• Resizes to the layer info panel (or, the window config in general) should stored in the Viking file so they're persistent across sessions.
• Visibility of the start/end trackpoints of a track should be controllable independently of the visibility of interior points. I think that it would also be handy if, near the start/end trackpoints, "Foobar start" and "foobar end" could be drawn, since otherwise I forget the tracks' names and I don't remember which little symbol is the end and which is the beginning.
• There should be a concept of a "current track". The current track should be drawn in a different color, and it should be highlighted in the list in the same color. One should be able to add points to either the start or the end, and there should be visual feedback which is going on. (Currently, it's very hard to tell what will happen when the Create Track tool is used.)
• Also, it's important to be able to have no current track; in this case the Create Track tool will start a new track. At the moment, I can't figure out how to start a brand new track after I've been editing one without restarting the program. Perhaps separate Begin Track and Extend Track tools would be a good idea?
• Track colors are kind of strange under "Track drawing mode: draw by track". Here are some suggestions:
  • Once a track is assigned a color, it should never change except by the user changing its color directly. (There might be a global "recolor tracks" command, in case the user wants help.)
  • There needs to be more contrast between the auto-assigned colors, and the number of colors doesn't need to be too big. I would say, pick three or four contrasting colors and rotate between them.
  • When a path is split at a trackpoint, the portion closer to the end point should be the one to change color. Perhaps a secondary dialog box listing the two new tracks, their names, and their colors, with opportunity to edit the last two items?
  • A path's color should appear in its list entry, too. Perhaps a small square by the name?
• I might further increase the contrast of the current trackpoint (selected with the edit trackpoint tool). Perhaps rather than changing its size, draw a big bold crosshair centered on it?
• For me, the Edit Track dialog obscures the track I am trying to edit when it first comes up.
• IMO, being able to customize the background color is an unnecessary feature, and should be removed to ease maintenance.
• I would rename the menu item "Zoom To..." to "Zoom to Custom..." and the "Zoom" submenu to "Zoom To".
• Type size in the layer list should be configurable.
• Type size and font for waypoints should be configurable.
• Deleting something big, like a track or a layer, should have a confirmation box.
• Implement undo and redo.
• It would be nice to have more information in the interface about which maps will be used depending on the "zoom level" of a map layer. For example, in a Terraserver topo layer, I had to discover by trial and error that <= 8x means "use 24,000:1 topo maps" and >= 16x means "use 100,000:1 topo maps".
• The ability to rotate and move waypoint text would be fabulous.
• Double-click centers, and mouse wheel zooms in/out like Google Maps.

Done

• It should be clearer which tool is active. Each tool should have its own cursor. r483
• When moving waypoints and trackpoints, there needs to be some feedback that the point has been picked up and is being moved (e.g. a grayed copy, or move the point graphic itself).
• Add a "pan" tool and make it the default, since the current default zoom tool is a little opaque to new users. r635
• Tracks names should permit mixed-case. r686