Celestia UI redesign

[chris]

If you were redesigning the Celestia user interface, what would it look like? It should be clean and uncluttered, but frequently used features should be readily accessible. The Qt4 thread in this forum shows one idea for how the star browser should look.

- What features of Celestia do you use all the time?

- What features of Celestia do find very useful now but took a long time to discover?

- What things do you wish were possible from the GUI?

--Chris

[BobHegwood]

Chris,

One thing almost immediately comes to mind for me. That involves
the presentation of moons for selected planets. Jupiter, for example,
with ALL of its moons, presents a very unwieldy interface when one
is trying to select a particular moon from the interface. Now, granted,
not everyone is going to have all of Jupiter's moons installed, but I
am running into this problem with both Jupiter and Saturn.

To clarify, when I right-click on Jupiter, I currently have 63 choices
displayed in the moons category. The arrows at the top and bottom
of the screen work fine, but they really are unwieldy. Do you suppose
that we could get a pop-up window for this function?

Just a thought for you.

Thanks, Bob

[phoenix]

chris, I have 2 quick thoughts on this:

1. it would be great if the UI-elements could be docked / undocked and moved around freely on the screen or even off the screen to another monitor

2. the possibility to modify the UI by the user with either LUA or XML

great to see that the unified-UI-coding has finally begun!

[chris]

chris, I have 2 quick thoughts on this:

1. it would be great if the UI-elements could be docked / undocked and moved around freely on the screen or even off the screen to another monitor

Yes, that's already happening in the new Qt4 interface.

2. the possibility to modify the UI by the user with either LUA or XML

I'll have to see if there are Lua bindings for Qt4. I know that there are for wxWidgets, but other aspects of that toolkit make it less desirable than Qt4.

--Chris

[chris]

Chris,

One thing almost immediately comes to mind for me. That involves
the presentation of moons for selected planets. Jupiter, for example,
with ALL of its moons, presents a very unwieldy interface when one
is trying to select a particular moon from the interface. Now, granted,
not everyone is going to have all of Jupiter's moons installed, but I
am running into this problem with both Jupiter and Saturn.

I agree completely--all the minor moons of Jupiter and Saturn clutter both the 3D view (when orbits are enabled) and the GUI, and it's only on rare occasions that you actually want to see them. My current plan is to add a new "minormoon" category and organize the UI so that they appear in a separate category from the more significant moons. The distinction between what is a moon and what's a minor moon is somewhat arbitrary, which is why it will be settable in an ssc file rather than be automatically determined by Celestia.

[phoenix]

chris, I have 2 quick thoughts on this:

1. it would be great if the UI-elements could be docked / undocked and moved around freely on the screen or even off the screen to another monitor

Yes, that's already happening in the new Qt4 interface.

2. the possibility to modify the UI by the user with either LUA or XML

I'll have to see if there are Lua bindings for Qt4. I know that there are for wxWidgets, but other aspects of that toolkit make it less desirable than Qt4.

--Chris

that's good news!

I didn't have time to read through the QT4-featurelist yet.
but from what I've seen in the other thread and the developers-list it really looks promising with great extensibility.

[t00fri]

The browser NEEDS a search facility!

F.

[buggs_moran]

- What things do you wish were possible from the GUI?

Actual spaceflight


Sorry for polluting the thread...

[selden]

Bookmarks under Windows that use Cel:// URLs.
(I believe that's already the case under Linux.)

[ElChristou]

As already seen in a previous post, a more efficient browser with the possibility to add search criterions to narrow the results, possibility from the browser to mark/unmark the selection or the whole result of the search. From an ergonomic point of view I'd like to keep at one click the select/center/go commands (via buttons).

**

A script browser could be welcome displaying some meta data such Title, Description, Version compatibility, Author etc...

**

Concerning the general UI itself, the experiment by DW on osX called SuperTab was quite interesting, with a base window in which you could dock/undock whatever pane. Despite the few (almost null ) interest, perso I still think it's a pretty interesting solution (very flexible)...

[ElChristou]

Also a bookmark browser with a thumb could be a nice addition with the possibility to backup and share the backup file (the backup could have tags with date of export, author name...)

[MKruer]

Chris,

One thing almost immediately comes to mind for me. That involves
the presentation of moons for selected planets. Jupiter, for example,
with ALL of its moons, presents a very unwieldy interface when one
is trying to select a particular moon from the interface. Now, granted,
not everyone is going to have all of Jupiter's moons installed, but I
am running into this problem with both Jupiter and Saturn.

I agree completely--all the minor moons of Jupiter and Saturn clutter both the 3D view (when orbits are enabled) and the GUI, and it's only on rare occasions that you actually want to see them. My current plan is to add a new "minormoon" category and organize the UI so that they appear in a separate category from the more significant moons. The distinction between what is a moon and what's a minor moon is somewhat arbitrary, which is why it will be settable in an ssc file rather than be automatically determined by Celestia.

Chris, you might want to use the term "Dwarf Moon" considering the IAU obsession with dwarfs. Then just use the same general criteria that would be used for the planets and apply them to the moons.

[MKruer]

Excuse the crudeness, but under the view options, this might be a better format. Its incomplete, but it should give everyone a good example of what i was trying to do. The genral idea is to make it a one for one of how it would be constructed in the SSC. I hope that make sense.

[ElChristou]

Concerning the browser, if the search engine is implemented with multi criterions to filter the results, it will be difficult or impossible to have an ergonomic result when docked (or the panel is thin (as shown in your example) and the horizontal scroll-bar is a pain, or the panel is large and the OGL window become ridiculously small...)...

EDIT:

One possible option could be to hide/display some options; the basic browser windows could show:

----------------------------------------

Listing

-----

> Search : (closed)

-----

> Markers : (closed)

-----

Select | Center | Go | Refresh

-----------------------------------------


The extended version (with vertical scroll-bar) :

----------------------------------------

Listing

-----

\/ Search : (open)

Criterion 1 (+) (-)
Criterion 2 (+) (-)
Criterion 3 (+) (-)
Criterion 4 (+) (-)

Search (button)

warning field (no result)

-----

\/ Markers : (open)

Mark Selection only | Diamond | color
Mark all | Circle | color

Labels

-----

Select | Center | Go | Refresh

-----------------------------------------

Now do Qt allow this kind of stuff?

[Guckytos]

How about fitting ALL dockable displays with the function to minimize to one side of the screen.

By clicking on an arrow on the side of the display, the display minimizes to the side and you only see a small rectangle with an arrow pointing in the opposite direction. If you click on that arrow the display grows back to the size it was before.

And all the while ALL selections in the display e.g. search parameters in the star browser stay the same.

Would be usefull and stylish.

My 2 cents,

Guckytos

[chris]

Excuse the crudeness, but under the view options, this might be a better format. Its incomplete, but it should give everyone a good example of what i was trying to do. The genral idea is to make it a one for one of how it would be constructed in the SSC. I hope that make sense.

I don't want to end up with dialog box that looks like this--there are too many options that would never be used, and it mixes together several different types of settings in one place.

There's no need to be able to set shadows and atmospheres separately for different types of bodies. A single setting for atmospheres will satisfy everyone, and is less confusing. Similarly, there's never a need to render planets without asteroids or moons. Those options can all be removed.

The more commonly used options can go in a toolbar that's readily available, while the rarely used settings (cloud shadows, ring shadows, eclipse shadows) can go into the shadows section of a Render Preferences dialog box. I think this is better than mixing everything together in a single panel.

--Chris

[chris]

The browser NEEDS a search facility!

F.

A search facility for finding a single object by name? Or for filtering objects by some set of criteria?

--Chris

[chris]

Also a bookmark browser with a thumb could be a nice addition with the possibility to backup and share the backup file (the backup could have tags with date of export, author name...)

I think that the bookmark facility of the KDE version is pretty good. It would be nice to use that in Celestia and add the capability to export the bookmarks as either a backup bookmarks file or an HTML page with cel: URLs.

--Chris

[ElChristou]

The browser NEEDS a search facility!

F.

A search facility for finding a single object by name? Or for filtering objects by some set of criteria?

--Chris

Chris, what do "enter+name+enter" actually?

[t00fri]

The browser NEEDS a search facility!

F.

A search facility for finding a single object by name? Or for filtering objects by some set of criteria?

--Chris

Well I think there should be a very general search of the entire database. Many people may have different questions to it in the course of time.

About the pre-configured filters we should seriously contemplate, since each new filter will take pretty much space in the GUI dialog!

Stars with planets is cute, I think. Also the other two (closest and brightest) are useful. But there will certainly be more ... and then we'll soon run out of display space. Hence a good idea is needed here...

F.