Re: Release plans for the GUI

[Mark Everitt]

In my opinion only one thing really needs to be addressed, and that's
interactive plotting. The bare-bones gnuplot window offers rotations and
little else right now, and that's a huge obstacle to the people I work with,
who use Matlab to plot data more often than any numerical tasks. Think
laboratory data, plotting of functions worked out on paper. These
individuals even enjoy playing and interacting with their data, and placing
labels etc. This is the number one reason that my peers give when I
suggest using Octave and it locks me into Matlab too.

Everything else is little more than gloss. Remembering back to when I
was first trying Octave as a student I had similar frustrations. I had no
problems using a separate terminal and text editor, and I didn't really
missed the variable inspector panel. As I write this I'm using gedit with a
terminal plugin which performs very well, is /nimble/, and doesn't
take up a lot of extra space like dockable environments usually do,
especially on Linux.

My personal wish list is the following in order of preference:

1) Better plot plot tools integrated in the plotting window. Labels, axis
editing etc. Buttons.
2) Live syntax checking. This is a very useful feature in recent releases of
Matlab.
3) Variable inspector panel.

At the risk of getting flamed, I'm going to go as far as suggesting
ditching a grand unified GUI because much of it will be reinventing the
wheel. Enhance the plotting, maybe add the inspector panel using a
lightweight toolkit, and leave the rest 'til later. I know that this
contradicts
point two. ;)

Mark

http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/file/n3855978/37.png 

--
View this message in context: 
http://octave.1599824.n4.nabble.com/Release-plans-for-the-GUI-tp3790414p3855978.html
Sent from the Octave - Maintainers mailing list archive at Nabble.com.