[Gvsig_english] gvSIG build 1216: WISHES

[Benjamin Ducke]

The following is a list of (mostly very small) wishes for things I would like to see in
the final gvSIG 2.0, as they would help make the workflow in gvSIG more efficient. 
Overall, I think that gvSIG 2 is already very complete in terms of features. The only 
exception would be some major work that needs to be done in the map layout tool (as has 
been discussed previously on this list). Some of these wishes have been mailed to this 
list before, but I am posting the whole list here for completeness' sake.

Ben

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EDITING

WISH: Urgently needed is a way for the user to open a text representation of a geometry and directly edit coordinates in there.

WISH: Need a fast way to zoom and pan with the keyboard while creating geometries.

WISH: There are some "Editing" settings (related to colors) in the main "Preferences" menu and there is an "Editing settings" menu in editing mode. That does not seem to make sense. All settings related to editing should be in one place.


GUI: GENERAL

WISH: Please, please, please add a "recent projects" list to the File menu so user can quickly open the last project they worked on. This is the number one thing our users notice negatively. And it could be fixed so easily!

WISH: There should be more shortcuts to often needed functions in the layer context menu. "Show attribute table" would definitely be a candidate for me. Others are "Export to..." and "Select All"/"Select None" (wishes).


VECTOR LAYERS

WISH: View->Selection: urgently need function "Select All" and "Clear Selection"

WISH: "Show attributes table" needs to go into context menu. Currently only "Start edition" is available via both the context menu and the "Layer" menu. This needs to be more stringent.


TABLES

WISH: In many cases, it would be very useful to be able and set only empty (NULL) fields (both numeric and string) to a user-specified value. I have never been able to figure out how to do that with the built-in functions.

WISH: Support for auto-generated field values to quickly fill fields with number series of predefined step size (like in Excel): if the users enters "0,10,20", then marks that sequence, the software should be able to figure out that it needs to continue with "30,40,50,...".


EXPRESSION CALCULATOR FOR FIELDS

WISH: In many cases, it would be very useful to be able and set only empty (NULL) fields (both numeric and string) to a user-specified value. I have never been able to figure out how to do that with the built-in functions.

WISH: Support for auto-generated field values to quickly fill fields with number series of predefined step size (like in Excel): if the users enters "0,10,20", then marks that sequence, the software should be able to figure out that it needs to continue with "30,40,50,...".

RASTER LAYERS

WISH: "Area of interest" tool should provide rectangle (and circle?) tools for defining regularly shaped areas of interest.


TOPOLOGY EXTENSION

WISH: Geometry info: useful addition, but it would be useful to have a "Copy" button to copy the WKT string to the system clipboard and a "Save" button to write it to a textfile.

WISH: Since the "Generalization" factor only applies to tools in editing mode, it should go into the "Edition properties", instead of the global "Preferences" menu.


PROJECTION SUPPORT

WISH: For our projects, we sometimes need local coordinate systems. Those are simple cartesian systems for very small areas with a local 0/0/0 origin that do not need any datum or projection support. It would be useful to be able and define a "non-world" or "local X/Y/Z" type reference system without any projection, datum, central meridian etc. (all that would be needed would be units like "meters" or "feet").



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