Valentina Studio - Top 10 Impressions

[Jochen Peters]

Hi Ed!

 >Here are my Top-10 initial reactions and comments:

 >Central theme: The most scarce resource in any GUI application is  
screen
 >space, and VS is very wasteful of it.
Well - GUI design has often been balanced between a screen full of  
all available information
and a well structured presentation of only the relevant info - and -  
often the individual
"taste" is different for different people.
So - putting as much info as possible into the avaliable space can  
often be easily made
with a DOS like screen approach :-):-)
But general speaking i agree with you that we should not waste space!

 >1) I can use the preference to change the font displayed in the Schema
 >Browser, however that doesn't gain me any advantage vertically  
since it uses
 >HUGE icons that take up about two lines of vertical space when I  
set the
 >ont small to say, 9 pt Geneva.
Yes - the simple reason is that the font info is currently not used  
in the Schema Browser -
so i will add that ASAP. We can easily adjust the icons to a  
reasonable height depending
on the current font size. This will give you the possibility to use  
the vertical space in
the Schema Browser more effective.
That said the question is if we should need the possibility to define  
DIFFERENT font/font sizes
for Schema Browser/Data Browser, what you think?

 >2) In Column view, if I resize the window tall to include all the  
rows the
 >scroll bar disappears — which is ok. If I then resize window to be  
short the
 >scroll bars do not reappear, which is a problem when you have a lot of
 >tables, especially since due to (1) above you can't gain back any  
screen
 >real estate by using smaller fonts.
This seems to be a bug. Ed - it would be helpfull for us if you can  
report bugs
in our bug tracking systems - we have a category for vStudio bugs in  
there.

 >3) Setting font to a smaller or larger size appears to have no  
desirable
 >benefits for the Data browsers.  It appears to change the height of  
the
 >header row, but does not change the size of the text displayed in  
any row.
 >It can therefore not be used to make shorter lines to view more  
lines in the
 >window, nor can it be used to see more characters across in headers  
for
 >narrow columns.
This is also a bug! This has worked before - but as Ruslan mentioned  
the DataBroswer
was completly rewritten - so - it seems we must reenable the use of  
the font info to
size the rows accordingly.

 >4) Selecting the "List View" option for Schema Browser in Preferences
 >appears to have no effect on newly opened browsers either before or  
after
 >relaunching the VS App.
Yes - i have disabled the list view - it was not very usefull and i  
want first concentrate
on the column view. If we will have the column view nearly perfect i  
will work on the list view again
(in case we still need it)

 >5) Icons at the bottom of the Data Browser window impart a minimum  
window
 >width.  My first preference would be for these to either be  
optional, or go
 >away, or be stacked into two rows, or otherwise fixed so that I  
could make
 >my windows much narrower and therefore get more windows for more  
tables all
 >visible on the screen at the same time instead of having the right  
half of
 >the Data Browser windows showing useless blank white space.  If you  
display
 >a Data Browser for a related table it gets even worse, because the  
"Related
 >Table" tool bar doubles the minimum required width of the window.
Well - for the "normal" browser this comes only in effect if you have  
- say - only 2 -3 fields
in a table, right? For the "related browser" - maybe you are right.  
On the other hand the
options for the related browser are very powerfull and we must put  
them somewhere...

 >6) That said, if GUI is going to steal massive amounts of otherwise- 
useful
 >screen space from the user's display, the least it could do is put  
something
 >useful in that space.  By default all of the columns are displayed  
in a very
 >narrow width that does not display either the full column headers,  
nor in
 >many cases the full data content even when 80+% of the window space  
to the
 >right of the displayed columns is blank white space that can note be
 >eliminated due to (5).
 >
 >7) Worse yet, column widths are not retained.  So if I adjust the  
width of
 >all the columns to make the headers and data visible and then  
change the
 >"Table:" from the pop menu at the top of the window, then later  
return to
 >this same table I then have to manually resize all of the columns once
 >again.  What an incredible pain in the rear!
I think the main point here is storing the width of the columns,  
right? That way
we can use the otherwise wasted space. Yes - this must be done. For  
this we need
to store this info along with any table in a database. I have  
discussed this with
Ruslan before - it is simply not yet implemented.

 >8) I appreciate it that when I select a record, that one  
(unpredictable)
 >field is highlighted.  I do not appreciate the fact that it is  
highlighted
 >in a manner such that if I type any character on the keyboard the  
contents
 >is then CHANGED.  I would far prefer to see it highlighted in a  
manner — or
 >not at all if I just click on a row number (recId) that requires me to
 >explicitly click on the cell to begin cell editing.  Especially  
since there
 >is no UNDO so if I accidentally change a value and don’t recall its
 >(potentially very long) previous value, there's no way to restore it.
No - wrong. You can press "ESC" to restore the previous value. And note
that the record is saved only if you go to another record!

 >8a) BTW when I change a field as described in (8) does VS  
immediately write
 >the new value to the table?
No - see above.

 >Or does it keep a local copy that is only
 >flushed to disk for real when I do an explicit File Save  
operation?  Since I
 >don't see either a File Save or a File Save As on the menu I'm  
guessing that
 >my database is instantly corrupted as soon as I type a character as
 >described above in (8).

 >8b) Is there any way to use VS in a "read-only" mode, such as the  
way you
 >can use BBEdit or TextWrangler.  I of course opened VS on a copy of my
 >database out of paranoia, but if I need to explicitly write protect  
a large
 >database before using VS on it to protect myself it would be good  
to know.
 >I was not able to find any available documentation for download on  
the VS
 >tool.
Well - Read-Only made can be done very easy, i think. Maybe we should  
do that? Ruslan?
The documentation will be available shortly after releasing the final  
version.


 >9) I would really appreciate a non-metalic Schema Browser window,  
or at
 >least an option for such.
Ok - can be easy added as a option.

 >10) The "Action" pop-up as the Finder window tool-tip calls it  
(button with
 >gear icon) does not pop up on mouse click and hold as is the  
convention for
 >this popup.  It only opens upon unclick.
Ok - this can be changed, too.




-- 
Best regards,
Jochen Peters
PIIT GmbH

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http://www.valentina-db.de