2016-03-25 Meeting notes

Date

Mar 25, 2016

Attendees

John Clyne, alan, scott

Notes

Discussed items 10 (region of interest control) and 11 (mouse modes for manipulators) from GUI usability review - March 8, 2016

Item 10:

Several new challenges have been introduced by 3.0's more flexible data model:

1. It's not possible (due to computational cost) to know the entire spatial domain of a data set apriori
2. Variables may occupy different spatial domains (e.g. staggered variables, mixing data sets (ocean and atmosphere)
3. 2D renderers currently each have their own ROI selection, while 3D renderers use a global selector (the "Region" tab)
4. Coordinates for manipulators, etc. are stored/specified relative to a global domain in 2.x. This model doesn't hold up when the domain can potentially change as new variables (or data sets) are loaded. Relative coordinates are useful for facilitating support of moving domains (e.g. as found in many WRF simulations)

It's not clear how to address these issues in an intuitive, and efficient manner. It was decided to post-pone the issue until we have data sets (or the ability to combine multiple data sets) that can be used for testing. Unfortunately, this means that for now we need to maintain the notion "domain defining variables" and a global "Region" tab.

Item 11:

John and Scott were both of the opinion that a single "display manipulator" checkbox replacing the current "navigation modes" would provide a more intuitive interface. In this scenario when the check box was enabled the manipulator for the currently active tab/instance would be displayed. In the case that a tab had multiple manipulators (e.g. Flow - rake and region) both manipulators could be shown. Alan had reservations about this change regarding it's impact on usability to linked tabs (e.g. specifying isovalues via the probe).

Alan is going to assess the effort involved for making the change.

John is not sure that this item is correctly prioritized; we may table it for later.

We also discussed making as much progress as possible on the 2D and image renderers while Alan is here full time. Scott will produce a mockup of the proposed GUI for each.

Action Items