Statistics Notebook and dive numbering question

Dirk Hohndel dirk at hohndel.org
Wed Oct 24 10:45:12 PDT 2012


Here's an interesting request that I got offline from a diver playing
with Subsurface. He was wondering if the statistics notebook page could
give some indication which dives the statistics are covering.

Sounds simple, right? But there are of course way too many corner cases
to take into consideration:

If the dives are numbered, one could list the dives covered, with clever
ellipses to make things compact.

But what if they aren't numbered?

Well, one simple answer could be "hey, if the dives aren't numbered, we
should siply number them. ALWAYS". I'll get back to that in a minute.

We could list dates or locations or stuff - but that would get way to
busy and hard to deal with. Very quickly.

So let's talk about numbering all the dives. Initially we didn't do this
because we figured that different people have different preferences when
it comes to the organisation of their dives. But the more I think about
this, the more I think "why would someone want to have their dives
un-numbered? that's just stupid".

So should we, by default, simply start numbering unnumbered dives? So
the first time a user imports, if the computer gives you dive numbers,
use those, otherwise just start with #1 and count up?

What if the user inserts a dive somewhere in the middle? Just renumber
the ones that come after it?

What if dives are deleted? Leave things unchanged? Have an option to
renumber?

Should there be a more complex renumber dialog? Should there a way to
manually edit the number of a dive, or of a group of dives that are
selected (where you give the starting number and then the later dives in
the selection are numbered accordingly)? What if the selection is
non-consecutive? What if any of this creates a duplicate number with an
existing dive?

Am I making this to complicated and should we simple enforce "all dives
are numbered consecutively - all the user can define is the starting
number?" - that would make most of the questions above really easy to
answer... and wouldn't require any new UI work ;-)

Anyway, I think these are interesting UI design questions and while I
have some ideas what I would like to do I want to hear others chime
in...

/D


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