geomview comments

[sullivan]

Here are some thoughts I had when first using geomview.
Most I have already mentioned to Mark or Tamara.

There is some bug in the Save All command.  This command might better be
called Save State.

When I was Showing Lights, I first expected them to move when I rotated
"World".  Perhaps World should be called "All Objects".

When Rotate or Zoom is selected, the middle and/or right mouse buttons cause
strange characters to appear in the keyboard input window.  It's too bad
keyboard input can't be given when the mouse is over a panel.

When a camera is selected, and something is changed in the Appearance
panel, the last object to have been selected (or World) is modified.
Perhaps this object should be reselected in the main panel at that time.
When World is selected, perhaps the appearance panel could indicate in
some fashion the features that have different values for different objects.
Such features can be modified (for all objects) if World is selected,
but cannot be modified when Current Camera is selected when World was the
last object selected.

"Default Camera" and "Default Camera<2>" are the wrong names to be used for
cameras 0,1.  Mark did explain to me why this happens.  But if a camera is
created from the Add Cam button, rather than from Load'ing a camera file,
the name should be "Camera #" where # is the number of the camera window.

The 'c' keyboard command seems not to work.

the '2N' command should be explained as "Normalize" "Sequence".  It is
confusing to have the Normalize choices, which affect single objects, in the
Obscure panel, which otherwise affects the whole program.

How about changing "Norm scale" to "Normals len".  It is now confusing
(espcially so close to the Normalize menu.

I found mouse usage for Zoom, Cam Fly, and moving lights a bit confusing
at first.  It would be nice to have some kind of help panel that would
explain what the mouse is doing in such cases.  The diagonal mouse for
the 1-d mouse things is good, in that nobody's likely to try NW-SE motion
But if you do, it's quite jittery, while staying roughly still.

Does the zoom pay attention to a constant plus the distance from mouse to
center of window?  That's what it feels like.

It would be nice if switching back to Euclidean space did a normalize each
to "World".

It's not clear what the big text field in the Obscure panel is for.  The text
fields are visited in a quite strange order when you hit the tab or return
keys.

It's confusing that the Lines options in Obscure apply globally, and the View
just to the current camera (in some sense I haven't fully tested for--it's
not clear which values will be displayed and which affected when something
other than an individual camera is selected in the main panel--for instance,
I think if an object or world or Current Camera is selected, it will apply
to the camera in the last visited view window, but the values from the other
camera may still be showing.  You can hit return on one of these wrong values,
and the camera won't change, but if you retype the same value and hit return,
it will change.)

The motion of lights under the mouse was clear after Mark explained that they
are attached to a sphere, the front of which you're rotating like an object.
But it wasn't at all clear at first.  If I have a light selected in "Lighting",
and click with the middle button in the view window, I get repeated errors:
checking for picking light 1
checking for picking light 2
no light picked

When I selected "Draw Cams", I saw camera 1 in the camera 0 window, but not
camera 0 in camera 1 window.  I eventually got the other one displayed, and
then couldn't turn it off.  It's not very clear which cameras will be affected
by that button.  I now guess that that button and the background color
button affect the view in the current window, either an explicitly selected
one or the last one visited.  I guess the real def'n is that it is controlled
by the last camera (as opposed to object) choice made in the main panel.
If that choice was Current Camera, then it depends on the last visited window.
Anyway, if you select CC, then World, then click background color, start
editing it, then go do something in another view window, then edit the
color some more, and then cancel, some weird things happen.

If the current behavior is kept for "Draw Cams" the "s" in its name should
be removed.

-John