[josm-dev] Dynamic buttons in side menus

[Dirk Stöcker]

On Sat, 15 Oct 2011, Pieren wrote:

> I wrote a diary because I don't think it has to go to Trac. UI is
> always a question of personnal taste. Now JOSM looks like a Flash
> game. The only missing feature is to get 50 points each time you click
> fast enough on appearing objects or new cursor effect. All these
> things make finally a strange impression of not very serious
> interface. Fine, as soon as I can disable them. But I understand. I'm
> a dev myself and when you work on a mature projects, it is always
> difficult to find the good moment to say 'no'.

The sidemenus have mainly the task to display information. Interaction is 
only rarely required. The current solution helps to fix the issue that we 
need more space in the side menus. The other solution would be to ban 
buttons from these menus completely and move them into popups or menu.

I believe that would produce much more reaction than the current method, 
which may not be standard UI design today, but nevertheless is very 
intuitive nonetheless.

JOSM is used more and more in areas which have nothing to do with OSM 
alltogether. It is used simply as an easy to use spatial editor. So 
contrary to what you write above the UI of JOSM can't be that bad as you 
say.

JOSM has a lot of features and it is always hard to get lots of stuff into 
a small and simple interface. And maybe not each decission we do is the 
right one finally and needs to be adapted or reverted. But I'm careful 
when introducing new concepts and till now the results verify the way I'm 
going. So while improvements in the new dynamic buttons may come (e.g. a 
possibility to turn it off for individual sections) I currently don't so a 
reason to turn it off again.

An observation I made in the past: Usually people telling me the "novice 
users wont accept it" want to preserve their own accustomed way of work 
only. Novice users most of the time have been a lot happier to accept UI 
changes than the old users.

And a note to previous poster: The "there is always Potlatch around" is so 
old and actually I tend to ignore people using it. JOSM cannot and will 
not satisfy everyone. JOSM needs a bit of larning to use it (although we 
reduced the minimum required amount over the last years). Whoever finds 
Potlatch better should use it instead. I don't care.

Ciao
-- 
http://www.dstoecker.eu/ (PGP key available)