Main menu View organisation

[Dirk Hohndel]

On Sun, 2013-11-17 at 08:05 +0200, Willem Ferguson wrote:
> May I make a suggestion for reorganising the View main menu item? 
> Curremtly it has
> View All
> Divelist only
> Profile only
> Info only
> Globe only
> 
> My question is: Is there any use at all in being to see the Divelist 
> only by itself? Without at least one of the other helper panels one 
> cannot do any work with the Divelist alone, one can only look at the list.

But that argument is entirely about your idea of what "do work" means. 
I end up using just the dive list when looking back at past diving.

> Similarly if one views the Dive Notes panel in isolation, there is 
> abolutely nothing to be gained by viewing it by itself, except if you 
> have copied a mammoth article into the bottom Notes field. Viewing this 
> panel full-screen does not reveal any information or provide any 
> functionality that does not exist in the View All mode.

Yes, it provides a lot more space to look at things.

Remember, there are people with 1024x600 screens out there, who want to
be able to use Subsurface.

> For the other two panels, there may be some divers out there who would 
> like to view the marble panel by itself, or the dive profile by itself.

I certainly fall into both of these groups.

> My suggestion for sensible combinations are:
> 
> View All
> DiveList + DiveNotes panel [This allows one to inspect, say, the 
> equipment or notes during several dives]
> DiveList + DiveProfile         [This allows one to inspect dive profile 
> characteristics for several dives]
> DiveProfile                          [The most useful would probably be 
> while doing hand-entered data or dive planning (V4.1!!) full-screen]
> Globe                                  [For those who want to spin the 
> globe to where they have dived all over the world]

We can create any number of permutations - I just don't know how this
makes things any better.

The ability to watch a single pane by itself is very much targeted at
people with very small screens. Use View All or divelist only to
navigate to the dive you want, then look at one pane at a time. All the
other combinations... you can create them by moving the splitters
around.

We could certainly add more options, but I don't think this would make
Subsurface any easier to use - it's much more likely to just clutter the
menus.

/D