[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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