Survex (interface expectation)

[Mark Shinwell]

On Mon, Jul 15, 2002 at 05:05:50PM +0100, David Gibson wrote:
> >The "View" word processor, for example,
> >later developed into ViewPS by Neil Raine at Acorn, produced, in 1986,
> >a word-processed (caving) journal on a BBC Micro + Apple laser writer which
> >still looks better than anything I can get out of Word (TM).
> 
> Andy - you sound like an Arts Graduate who is proud of the fact that he
> doesnt know anything about science or maths and considers it beneath
> him. You went to Cambridge fucking University for godsake and if you are
> unable or unwilling to exercise your brain in learning what *everybody*
> else does then ... um .. I dont know, be quiet or something.

Well, not *everybody* uses Word at all, and many that do produce shoddy
documents to be frank.  I think I produced documents using Impression on
the Acorn which look better than many Word documents I see floating
around nowadays.  And in particular:

> > I realise that Word is without doubt
> >the worst piece of software in the universe
> 
> Actually, Word is very good.

I beg to differ.  There are other tools around which produce far more
well-formatted documents than Word does.  Yes yes, you can make Word
produce no doubt the same thing but it requires a hell of a lot of
effort.

You can often even make a very good guess that a document's been
produced using Word by just looking at it (and no I'm not joking)!

And let's not even start on the potential security issues involved by
the way that Word saves its documents...

> >The problem is how to get over to users of Survex that this is *not* an
> >appropriate idiom for cave survey software. Users need to understand about
> >cave surveying
> 
> All we're talking about is that when you load up Survex there should be
> a File menu with options for New, Open, Edit, Save, Save As, and a file
> history list.  That doesnt seem that contentious to me.

First I observe that commonly-used text editors often provide such menu
items, and Aven also provides many of them.

Secondly I think "*not* an appropriate idiom for cave survey software"
sums it up.

New what?  Survey data file, survey project, directory for storing data?
Oh, surface or underground survey, or maybe a mixture?  etc etc.  Save
what?  Survey data file/project/current view as bitmap/dxf/pos file etc.
Something to do with "commit to revision control" might come in
somewhere too.

I take the point that we don't have a fully-fledged GUI yet for Survex,
but that is on the way, and is unfortunately very much more complicated
to design than just saying "we need New, Open, etc".  (There is a
serious point here about what we _do_ actually need though.)

For example, it's taken nearly 2 years' of work to get Aven's GUI to the
standard it is: and that is very much more simple than the sort of
system which would be required to support processing of complicated
survey projects.  Apart from the design time, the sheer
coding/debugging/testing time needed is enormous.

I also have to say that, having had a brief play with Compass and Walls,
which are "proper" GUI applications in some sense, that I found both of
those very much less intuitive (particularly for viewing caves) than the
equivalent Survex tools.  Not to say that they don't have any good
features of course...

A proper GUI interface for printing surveys will probably be one of the
next things on the list for Aven.

> >In my (contentious ? Moi ?) opinion, users who don't want to read a manual
> >and can't use a command line interface, should probably be actively
> >encouraged to keep out of the data processing side of cave surveying :-)
> 
> If that were - inasmuch as it could be - the *official* view of the
> Survex developers then I would be rather dismayed and - were I to have
> more free time - I would consider it my duty to campaign against the lot
> of you. :-)

No comment ;)

However, one thought which comes to mind is this: would one rather have
a suite of tools which take time to learn and are harder to get to grips
with, but are very powerful; or an all-singing, all-dancing Windows
wizard-oriented application with a popup Survey Assistant (a little
dancing clinometer maybe; "it looks like you're fabricating survey
data...would you like some help?") which doesn't actually do the real
job as well?

There are also examples of things like the 3D design package Maya, which
is fully graphical but, as far as I understand, takes a very long time
to get to grips with indeed.  I expect AutoCAD is like that too...

Mark

-- 
Mark Shinwell -- http://mrs30.quns.cam.ac.uk/ -- Mark.Shinwell@cl.cam.ac.uk
Theory and Semantics Group, University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory