Minutes from SSS Mtg 2008-Feb-19

We had a good turn out of scientists yesterday: Gustaaf, Lorant, Bryan, Michael,
Brigette, and Fraser.  Mark Clausen showed up as well.

I think everyone had some good input and was caught up on how the tools work.
I think they are ready to start playing with it in earnest.  Some suggestions
and conversation topics that came up:

* Move and/or rename the "New" menu.
  Fraser didn't see the new menu or know what it was for.
  May make New a sub-menu of File (which is fairly standard) and perhaps change
  the name to "Create" or "Create New".
  Not sure whether to do one or the other or both yet.

* They noted the lack of priority on the project page

* remove quotes around scan mode and src name on the scan page

* Bryan and Frazer arm wrestled on whether or not we should move the antenna wrap
  selection from the first tab of the scan page into the options tab (with the
  scan intents, etc.)  They couldn't come to an agreement.

* They would like to see a diagram of the wraps and what they mean put up on the
  page somewhere because a large number of users don't understand them and thus
  just don't use that option at all.

* They want Undo.  My guess would be that this could turn out to be a month long
  concentrated endeavor and I'm not sure what, if any, side effects may pop up.

* They all thought that adding a feature to be able to unroll a loop would be nice.
  (I.E. actually replace the loop with its unrolled contents, not just *look* at
  what the unrolled loop would be.)  I think they wanted each scan to be copied as
  well, so that they could unroll the loop and change 1 specific scan in the middle
  that was causing "trouble".

* Bryan thought the "bracketed" loop idea confused more than helped.

* They want to be able to change the mode of a scan w/o having to go create a new one.
  They are perfectly content loosing information.

* Still not big fans of the drag and drop.  Primarily, if you have a loop as the last
  child of something, right now it takes several non-intuitive steps to put a scan
  *after* (not in) that loop.  Brigette suggested adding left and right arrows next
  to our current up and down arrows that would promote and demote a node (i.e. change
  it's parent up one level or down one level....not sure how down would work though.
  Perhaps it would be added to the loop directly after it if such a loop existed?)

* still need to auto-select a default scan intent when creating a new scan.
  For Pointing, you should already have the pointing intent selected, etc.

* Interferometric Pointing does not need the selection of reference antennas.
  (not sure about single dish...)

* We should not have the subarray selection in the app. yet because it will not
  be supported in the rest of the system by the time of the Ka band observation shindig.

* Bryan wanted to know when the SB summary tab would be done.

* They were considering having the summer students and/or the summer school attendees
  be guinea pigs for usability testing our applications.

* we might add a link on each row in the SB summary tab back to the Scan.

* was also considering removing the word "Tool" from the headers to make the names
  smaller and adding the word "Catalog" back to the name of the used-to-be-RCT tool.

* Fraser noted that there are people (in the building even) that have shaky hands
  (for whatever reason) that will effectively guarantee they won't be dragging and
  dropping anything w/o a lot of aggrevation.  We should probably make some effort
  (though maybe not right now) to make sure everything you can do via DnD you can
  do some other way as well. The only widget that violates this right now is the
  new widget for selecting array configurations at the PB level.

* on the note of array cfgs., they were not happy with the names in that enumeration.

* I broached the topic of having drag n' drop in the tree do a copy instead of a move
  and I'm not convinced we came to a consensus there. The possibilities were: always
  move, always copy, or if you drag from one project to a different project do a copy,
  otherwise do a move. There were proponents of all 3 approaches.

I think that covers it all. Cheers!

-- 

Brian Truitt
Software Engineer-EVLA
btruitt@aoc.nrao.edu
835-7381