| -----Original Message----- | From: Ulf Lamping | | Hi List! | | After having a deep thought about the usability of the | Ethereal menu in general, and reading the "Human Interface | Guidelines" both of Gnome and KDE, I would like to suggest a | cleaned up menu structure and other minor usability enhancements. | | As a new release will be come in the next days, I don't want | to start changing things in CVS, before this release is out. | Otherwise the users will be contronted two times with "major" | GUI updates. | | Please find attached a html document, which will outline the | changes I'm thinking of. | | Feel free to send comments to this on the developer list (if | you find an error, have an answer to one of the open question, ...) | | Regards, ULFL
Excellent overview! Regarding "Edit->Mark Frame" feature, I'd like to have an "Invert Selection" as a minimum addition. "View->Show frame in new window": replace with "View->Frame in new window" I suppose the "Analyse->Decode As" will still be available by right-clicking on a packet in the tree pane? If so, we can then also get rid of "Analysis->Follow TCP Stream". Should "TCP Stream Analysis" be part of "Analyze" or of "Statistics"? IMHO both menu items overlap in functionality. Regarding the Packet versus Frame discussion, I think this is difficult to circumvent as every protocol defines an own name for its SDU/PDU. Ethernet and Frame Relay talk of frames, while ATM talks of packets :) Upper-level protocols define their own jargon: TCP segments, IP datagrams, others define PDUs that convey SDUs etc... So all depends on the lowest-level protocol in the capture. Regarding capture versus display filters, I thought Ethereal once intended to be rather independent from the packet capture interface, and for this I think it is OK to keep both (capture and display filter language)in. However I agree that not all users have access to pcap man pages, so we will have to provide at least an URL and ideally a pcap man page to Ethereal. Maybe we can provide a "Cool tip of the day" feature where FAQ items (and the capture versus display filter language) are displayed as pop-up on start of Ethereal (and via an "i" button on Ulf's new toolbar?)... Something not mentioned here but discussed over the last few days, is providing a mechanism that prevents automatic rescan of the entire packet list when the end-user is not yet done with configuring (e.g., IO-stat automatically scans the packet list at almost every click). Instead a button "Apply" should be foreseen. Regards, Olivier
