Problems with dive planning module.

[Willem Ferguson]

Having spent a lot of time playing around with the Dive planning module, 
trying to do anything (even stupid) that a user might attempt. There are 
several issues:

BUGS
1) Setting the 'Last stop at 6m' setting has no effect at all on the 
final dive plan.

2) Scaling:  The scaling on the Time axis of the plan, using the '+' and 
'v' buttons: If you magnify along the time axis using the 'v' button, 
even after full scale has been reached, it keeps record of the number of 
clicks. So if you click 'v' 5 times after full scale has already been 
reached and then you then want to reduce the size of the profile along 
the time axis, one needs to to click the '+' button 6 times before the 
image is reduced. It looks like a pointer is updated or increased every 
time one hits the 'v' button, and decreased every time one hits the '+' 
button. But this happens irrespective of whether the image of the 
profile has actually changed. I have managed to hang Subsurface several 
times now (having had to force-kill the process) by hitting the 'v' 
button several times after full magnification and then the '+' button, 
trying to reduce the size of the image. It seems that the 'v' button 
should only lead to any action (including background management) if the 
image is not at maximum size. Maybe the '+' button also needs attention 
with respect to the status of the graphics display. I hope this is 
understandable!

3) Several dive plans in dive list: When a dive plan is saved, it gets 
listed in the dive list, together with all one's other real-world logged 
dives. Now, if one creates the same dive plan more than twice, the dive 
plan actually looks and behaves very differently. You do not get the 
same dive plan. An example:
I created three instances of the dive plan shown at: 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/ve0ms1550aaa1bj/DivePlan1.png
Here they are shown in the dive list: 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/p7xwu9gq4db10xl/DiveList1.png
Here are the three profiles resulting from this plan: 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/2w2bhnyd4df1qis/DiveProfiles1.jpg
I suspect that, perhaps, dive no. 3 is considered a repetitive dive 
after dive no. 2 in the dive list, i.e. the dive planner sees the other 
dive plans listed in the dive list????


USER INTERFACE
1) Scaling buttons: Please use '+' for magnification and '-' for 
reducing the image. The two present buttons '+'=reduce, 'v'=magnify are 
totally counter-intuitive.

2) When entering the durations of dive segments, please allow entering 
the durations that applies to a specific segment only. Look at this 
screendump from VM-Plan that I sometimes look at: 
https://www.dropbox.com/s/27q6watntoxayg0/VM-PLan1.png
The interface is easy to work with because one does not have to do the 
mental calculation of the total time duration. VM_Plan calculates that 
automatically.

3) Allow for a larger range of gas mixes, specifically with respect to 
EANx and trimix. VM-Plan does this this by allowing the user to 
pre-define a gas mixture (see image above), thus accepting any arbitrary 
gas composition.

4) The completed dive plans are stored with the rest of the regular 
dives. I have not managed to discover a way to modify an existing dive 
plan (e.g. alter bottom duration, change gas mixture). There is a strong 
need for a more interactive and iterative modeling environment at that 
level, in the same way that it is now highly interactive in setting up 
an individual dive plan before saving it.

Having said this, I can only complement the developers who have gotten 
the planning interface so far. It knocks the hell out of any other open 
source software that I have seen and it reflects the amount of time and 
care that has gone into implementing this feature. This is making 
Subsurface so much more than just a simple dive log program and I think 
it is so far beyond what the original expectations of the software were.

Kind regards,
willemf