Valentina Studio - Top 10 Impressions

[Ed Kleban]

Howdy. 

I finally got to a point today where I had enough database tables to get
lost in amidst debugging and so I fired up Valentina Studio.  After being
less than impressed I then went looking for a newer version and downloaded
the beta version 2.1fc1 Build Dec 18 2005, 13:43:33 for Mac OS X and was
much more impressed.

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.

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
font small to say, 9 pt Geneva.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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 don¹t recall its
(potentially very long) previous value, there's no way to restore it.

8a) BTW when I change a field as described in (8) does VS immediately write
the new value to the table?  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.

9) I would really appreciate a non-metalic Schema Browser window, or at
least an option for such.

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.

Thanks!
--Ed