I asked Steve if he could help me shake down the newest version of Stellarium on the Macintosh platform. With all the changes to version 0.12, and all the new functions, I want to make sure I have the keyboard and mouse shortcuts correct.
Met up on St Clair West in the afternoon. He had installed the application on his Macbook Pro the day before. First we configured the planetarium software for his location, with all the useful plug-ins, and the preferred display settings. Then we tested every keyboard and mouse action in the application. I was surprised by a couple of things.
In my latest listings I had added keyboard shortcuts to toggle the compass marks and to toggle the night (red light) mode. When we found that they did not work on the Mac, I tried them on the PC. And they did not work there either! Huh? Why had I listed them? I must have seen them somewhere... And I thought I tested them. Strange. I first "learned" of the night mode shortcut when I briefly reviewed version 0.11.4. Is it the case that 0.12.x removed that shortcut? But the compass marks? How did I get that so wrong?
When we ran into issues, we checked the on-board help. I was very pleased to see that Help display showed the appropriate keyboard shortcuts given the platform, that is, it referred to the Command, Option, and Control keys for the Mac. In fact, it used the "classic" icons. That said, we noted that the key sequence shown in the pop-up text when you hover over buttons in the bottom toolbar is not correct. For example, it shows "Ctrl+M" or "Ctrl+Shift+H." That's unfortunate.
As we tested the sidereal time shortcuts, we discovered a problem or bug in the software. While the action for changing sidereal time by day and week works correctly, the display is adjusted incorrectly for the month or year actions.
And finally, Steve found the zooming counter-intuitive, when using the touchpad gestures. He found when he dragged two fingers up on the Macbook touchpad and Stellarium zoomed out he expected the opposite to happen.
Saturday, March 02, 2013
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You can still define keys to toggle the compass marks and night mode - there are several functions that have been left without default keys. We should probably put a warning somewhere to that effect.
When we ran into issues, we checked the on-board help. I was very pleased to see that Help display showed the appropriate keyboard shortcuts given the platform, that is, it referred to the Command, Option, and Control keys for the Mac. In fact, it used the "classic" icons.
I'm responsible for that. After the key customization system was added, the "Help" windows had been emptied of the keys - the bright bulbs who did it probably figured that people would use the key configuration windows as reference. (I'm not really happy with how the key configuration feature was implemented, i.e. with how it works "under the hood", but that's another conversation.) When I re-implemented the key list display, I remembered the Mac issue and that Qt has some handy functions for system-specific key combination display.
That said, we noted that the key sequence shown in the pop-up text when you hover over buttons in the bottom toolbar is not correct. For example, it shows "Ctrl+M" or "Ctrl+Shift+H." That's unfortunate.
Yes, I've missed that. :( I'll fix it, but there's a lot to fix. :(
P.S. Any idea why Blogger doesn't allow blockquote tags? :)
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