+++ Juan Corrin [2012-03-13 06:47 -0400]: > > Anything to encourage cavers to produce a final output, ie a friendly front > end to Therion, would be superb.
I don't think anyone would argue that xtherion is the best possible embodiment of a therion GUI. It was originally a proof-of-concept to see if a GUI to generate the highly co-ordinate intensive parts of the data could work. And it's clearly a huge improvement on having to work out the co-ords by hand and type them in :-) Unfortunately it has been rather too successful and has developed for many years now rather than being replaced by something less crufty, and also dealing with the rest of the problem (layout files, centreline data, etc). We keep hoping someone with the relevant expertise will get enthused and write some suitable software... The catch here is that it's much easier to add a bit more to the existing xtherion, further entrenching its model and tcl/tk, than to do it right (or at least hopefully better) by using a more flexible toolkit and rewriting the whole thing in the light of what we learnt first time round. Your points are well made Juan, and I don't think anyone really disagrees. Making more of the survex functionality available from the GUI would be nice too, for essentially the same reasons: at least for basic cases it's just easier to use and to get started. It's not easier for the software authors though and that's actually the rate-limiting resource here. Surveyors may not like having crufty interfaces and loads of stuff they don't care about exposed, but they can deal with that by simple application of time and effort. Being able to write GUIs is a different skillset and people with skills, motivation and time are thin on the ground. So maybe Andrew and I should start teaching Qt courses instead of Therion courses to solve this problem in the longer term :-) Wookey -- Principal hats: Linaro, Emdebian, Wookware, Balloonboard, ARM http://wookware.org/
