[josm-dev] Openvisible doesn't work anymore
Ulf Lamping
ulf.lamping at web.de
Mon Nov 5 21:42:15 GMT 2007
Frederik Ramm schrieb:
> Ulf, since you've been toying with the JOSM main menu, you will
> probably be as unhappy as I am about plugins adding their stuff
> whereever they like - in the case of OpenVisible, a menu entry is
> added at the bottom of the "file" menu, just after "exit". I think we
> should devise a way around this. Maybe have a "plugins" menu with one
> always-visible entry ("get plugins..."), and one sub-menu per loaded
> plugin - and then have plugins populate their sub-menus only.
> Something like that.
>
I'm against having a "plugins" menu that way. This splits the GUI into
the core and the plugin part. But IMHO a user is more interested to find
functionality where he expects it.
Let me try to explain by example.
Good example:
The WMS plugin has a distinct functionality that doesn't really fit into
any other menu. So the developer decided to add a new top level menu
item. This design fits well into the "whole" toplevel menu. The "greying
out" logic could be improved, but that's a different story.
Bad example:
The UtilsPlugin "only" adds some items to the left toolbar. While adding
these actions would fit perfectly into the Tools menu - the UtilPlugin
actions are very similiar to the ones already existing there. The
developer decided to put this into the left toolbar, where completely
different functionality usually resides - which in the end confuses the
user - at least it pretty much confused me.
Conclusion
IMHO, at least some of the plugins currently have very strange ideas
where to put GUI elements into JOSM. However, as we don't have that much
plugins, it should be possible to fix this with medium effort. We (I?)
might need to fix this. What I'm currently missing is some functionality
to place menu items, e.g.: "put this item above File/Exit" or something
like that.
IMO it's really worth to keep the current flexibility. Having a
"plugins" menu significantly limits the possible usability a plugin can
achieve. There are currently odds in the plugins, but these should be
fixed ...
Regards, ULFL
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