[GRASS-dev] New welcome screen

[moving to a new thread]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 10:55 PM, Markus Neteler <neteler@osgeo.org> wrote:

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 8:16 PM, Moritz Lennert
<mlennert@club.worldonline.be> wrote:

On 21/01/15 19:35, Markus Neteler wrote:

In my opinion we should not have the location selection dialog at all.
Revolution!

We should start GRASS right away in latlong like most GIS in the world.

Then let the user open the dialog to change projection if desired from
inside.

This would avoid a lot of questions right away.

Please don't do this !

OK, now being back from phone to a real keyboard, I can write a few more lines.

I am thinking about this issue for seeral years meanwhile (hint: I
started in 1993 to use the software, getting stuck at the text start
screen not having a manual :-).

So my full suggestions are
- beautify the actual screen (hence my recent suggestion which is
lively discussed here),
- optionally (!) allow to start GRASS without welcome/loc/mapset
screen but to open it in LatLong as described above. Again, as an
option. We could implement that in trunk and see how it goes. All the
tools to select locations, projections and such are there.

I find the fact that GRASS does not provide a default
projection system, but forces the user to think about projection from the
start, one of its strengths, both for work and for teaching.

On of it strenghts, yes. But I have been teaching GRASS a lot to GIS
professionals who got trained on different systems. And many asked
"why this screen? why cannot you just start like the other GIS"? And I
tend to agree (again: optionally). The point is that we, on the
contrary to many other GIS, still have all the control mechanisms in
place which avoid that the user mixes projections. So that's all fine.

Also in Portland at the FOSS4G conf (where I showcased GRASS GIS 7)
people suggested to let 'em get into the system right away. They
explained to me that a newcomer wants to see the menu to understand
how powerful the system is. But they would get stuck at the welcome
screen... Yes, and they don't want to think before they open the
program but "just try", out of curiosity.

A suggestion for a compromise:

Have a minimal welcome screen that says something like
"Starting GRASS GIS in location X, mapset Y"
nothing else, no list of all the available locations and mapsets

Only two buttons: OK, Change
Make OK the default, Change will bring up the current welcome screen.

The user has then just to hit enter and GRASS is running. This would
reduce the (confusing) amount of information on the current welcome
screen. It would also give more space for a little graphic :wink:

Location and mapset can be taken from GISRC, if that does not exist,
create a new GISDBASE in the user's home, put the demolocation in it
and use this (I think the wingrass installer is already doing that).

Markus M

IGNORE THIS THREAD

continued in

Making start of GRASS GIS easier for newcomers

On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 9:40 AM, Markus Metz
<markus.metz.giswork@gmail.com> wrote:

[moving to a new thread]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 10:55 PM, Markus Neteler <neteler@osgeo.org> wrote:

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 8:16 PM, Moritz Lennert
<mlennert@club.worldonline.be> wrote:

On 21/01/15 19:35, Markus Neteler wrote:

In my opinion we should not have the location selection dialog at all.
Revolution!

We should start GRASS right away in latlong like most GIS in the world.

Then let the user open the dialog to change projection if desired from
inside.

This would avoid a lot of questions right away.

Please don't do this !

OK, now being back from phone to a real keyboard, I can write a few more lines.

I am thinking about this issue for seeral years meanwhile (hint: I
started in 1993 to use the software, getting stuck at the text start
screen not having a manual :-).

So my full suggestions are
- beautify the actual screen (hence my recent suggestion which is
lively discussed here),
- optionally (!) allow to start GRASS without welcome/loc/mapset
screen but to open it in LatLong as described above. Again, as an
option. We could implement that in trunk and see how it goes. All the
tools to select locations, projections and such are there.

I find the fact that GRASS does not provide a default
projection system, but forces the user to think about projection from the
start, one of its strengths, both for work and for teaching.

On of it strenghts, yes. But I have been teaching GRASS a lot to GIS
professionals who got trained on different systems. And many asked
"why this screen? why cannot you just start like the other GIS"? And I
tend to agree (again: optionally). The point is that we, on the
contrary to many other GIS, still have all the control mechanisms in
place which avoid that the user mixes projections. So that's all fine.

Also in Portland at the FOSS4G conf (where I showcased GRASS GIS 7)
people suggested to let 'em get into the system right away. They
explained to me that a newcomer wants to see the menu to understand
how powerful the system is. But they would get stuck at the welcome
screen... Yes, and they don't want to think before they open the
program but "just try", out of curiosity.

A suggestion for a compromise:

Have a minimal welcome screen that says something like
"Starting GRASS GIS in location X, mapset Y"
nothing else, no list of all the available locations and mapsets

Only two buttons: OK, Change
Make OK the default, Change will bring up the current welcome screen.

The user has then just to hit enter and GRASS is running. This would
reduce the (confusing) amount of information on the current welcome
screen. It would also give more space for a little graphic :wink:

Location and mapset can be taken from GISRC, if that does not exist,
create a new GISDBASE in the user's home, put the demolocation in it
and use this (I think the wingrass installer is already doing that).

Markus M

Markus Metz <markus.metz.giswork@gmail.com> writes:

[moving to a new thread]

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 10:55 PM, Markus Neteler <neteler@osgeo.org> wrote:

On Wed, Jan 21, 2015 at 8:16 PM, Moritz Lennert
<mlennert@club.worldonline.be> wrote:

On 21/01/15 19:35, Markus Neteler wrote:

In my opinion we should not have the location selection dialog at all.
Revolution!

We should start GRASS right away in latlong like most GIS in the world.

Then let the user open the dialog to change projection if desired from
inside.

This would avoid a lot of questions right away.

Please don't do this !

OK, now being back from phone to a real keyboard, I can write a few more lines.

I am thinking about this issue for seeral years meanwhile (hint: I
started in 1993 to use the software, getting stuck at the text start
screen not having a manual :-).

So my full suggestions are
- beautify the actual screen (hence my recent suggestion which is
lively discussed here),
- optionally (!) allow to start GRASS without welcome/loc/mapset
screen but to open it in LatLong as described above. Again, as an
option. We could implement that in trunk and see how it goes. All the
tools to select locations, projections and such are there.

I find the fact that GRASS does not provide a default
projection system, but forces the user to think about projection from the
start, one of its strengths, both for work and for teaching.

On of it strenghts, yes. But I have been teaching GRASS a lot to GIS
professionals who got trained on different systems. And many asked
"why this screen? why cannot you just start like the other GIS"? And I
tend to agree (again: optionally). The point is that we, on the
contrary to many other GIS, still have all the control mechanisms in
place which avoid that the user mixes projections. So that's all fine.

Also in Portland at the FOSS4G conf (where I showcased GRASS GIS 7)
people suggested to let 'em get into the system right away. They
explained to me that a newcomer wants to see the menu to understand
how powerful the system is. But they would get stuck at the welcome
screen... Yes, and they don't want to think before they open the
program but "just try", out of curiosity.

A suggestion for a compromise:

Have a minimal welcome screen that says something like
"Starting GRASS GIS in location X, mapset Y"

Which would be the last opened mapset or, if opened for the first time,
the demo mapset?

nothing else, no list of all the available locations and mapsets

Only two buttons: OK, Change
Make OK the default, Change will bring up the current welcome screen.

I would add a third button which says "Start in demo location"
to make it easier to return to the demo location after having already
used GRASS GIS - for e.g. running examples and tests of other
applications which use the demo dataset.

The user has then just to hit enter and GRASS is running. This would
reduce the (confusing) amount of information on the current welcome
screen. It would also give more space for a little graphic :wink:

Location and mapset can be taken from GISRC, if that does not exist,
create a new GISDBASE in the user's home, put the demolocation in it
and use this (I think the wingrass installer is already doing that).

This sounds like a good compromise.

And if then there is a nice QGIS like dialog to create a new location /
mapset including projections, to start GRASS would be much easier.

Thinking of it - a history of recently used mapsets on the welcome
screen, which shows the projection, extent and the file path, is
something which would be really useful.

Cheers,

Rainer

Markus M

--
Rainer M. Krug
email: Rainer<at>krugs<dot>de
PGP: 0x0F52F982