More Location Fixes.

Linus Torvalds torvalds at linux-foundation.org
Tue Jul 14 12:34:27 PDT 2015


On Tue, Jul 14, 2015 at 12:15 PM, Dirk Hohndel <dirk at hohndel.org> wrote:
>
> Now I fly to Hawaii and go diving. I run the companion app. I am one of
> the people who first download the GPS fixes before they start editing the
> dives.

You realize that in many places you can't even do this? Because you
may not have interenet?

Any workflow that depends on order of companion app is broken.

Seriously. You haven't thought this through. Your model cannot work.
And the fundamental reason it cannot work is that you mix up two
things.

If you get GPS information from typing a name, the behavior is broken,
because that breaks the "I had no internet, so I'll have to download
GPS data later, but now I have GPS data because I happened to picka
name that already existed, so now it will never do that".

And it used to be broken the other way, where typing in the name would
overwrite GPS data. That was obvious crap too, although you used to
defend *that* behavior as well.

And if it acts differently depending on whether you write the whole
name, or whether you then see the name and auto-complete, that's also
obviously a complete disaster because that kind of difference is a UI
disaster. I may not be a UI person, but I know shit when I see it.

So exactly *how* do you suggest you solve it in your world-view?

I claim you need that extra button. You *have* to have some actually
visually obvious way to decide between "just pick the name" or "pick
this dive site". Really.  Not 16 rules for implicitly doing something
magical.

Now, *how* that extra button works might be tweakable, but not whether
it exists. If you don't have that explicit choice, and if it's not
clear, your model really *cannot* work.

You need to face the truth, not make up some workflow up front that
can be shown to be obviously broken. See above. Really.

Now, if you don't like the button press ahead of time, make it a
completion choice. But it needs to be an *explicit* choice. Do
something like:

 - start typing the name (if this is what you want to be the beginning point)

 - the completion needs to have the *choice* of cases, ie a drop-down
menu, where the first choice is "no GPS", but the other choices have
that GPS marker (that we have in the divelist too).

And if you explicitly press cursor down (and _only_ if you do that),
then the globe scrolls to that entry. There could be multiple entries
there, you need some way to see where it scrolls.

But it's also important that the globe *not* scroll until you do that,
because maybe you had the globe at the explicit point it was, because
you were looking up the dive site names around that area!

And again, it's important that this is an explicit choice. Really. It
*has* to be. If it's not a button press ahead of time, it needs to be
a button press (or keyboard action) after you've seen the list. Not
some implicit "if you complete the name" thing. Because that cannot
work, and you need to admit that.

        Linus


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