Dissolving dialogs

[Kunda1]

Was trying to draw an arrow in Krita and encountered the coolest open source UX phenomena, a dissolving dialog that oriented me in the right direction!

Krita-self-destrucing-dialogs.gif (175.18 KiB) Viewed 2425 times

Wouldn't this be useful in FC?
Thoughts?

[vanuan]

I think FreeCAD badly needs operation validation. That is, instead of trying some operation and failing with errors in Python console or error dialog, there should be some validation step whether the operation would fail before it happens.

As to how to communicate the future failure to the user, that's a secondary concern. Options I can think of are:

• show a transparent disappearing notification message (like in Krita)
• disable/hide the UI element which corresponds to invalid operation in a given context
• hide/show highlight/dim UI elements that correspond to objects to which operation is applicable

But again, we should have operation validation in the first place.

And for operation validation to work we need a strict type system. With link feature, duck typing and even lack of operation/object types themselves we can't be sure whether operation is applicable in a given context or not.

So another option is trying, failing and reverting. This means errors should be recoverable. But they're often not. That is an operation that leads to invalid state needs human intervention to bring it back. Edit history is also lacking, that is the "Undo" button not always work (operation transactions are not used consistently).

So the problem is much deeper than the lack of transparent tooltips/notifications.


The simplest solution would be to replace the error dialog with this splash notification. But error messages are also lacking and often not helpful (e.g. error message with stacktrace)

[Kunda1]

@vanuan thanks again for weighing in. I always appreciate your analysis. It's a little overwhelming though since often is the case that you point out what I understand (from your perspective) are some fundamental issues in FC architecture that need to be addressed before adding this or that issue. Not sure if that is what the core devs are aligned with or perhaps they are but are very busy to weigh in on?

[vanuan]

Well, as it is often the case in open source projects, contributors focus on GTD (getting things done) rather that on maintenance and long term success. It is maintainers ("core devs") who should establish rules to make the core of the project stable and powerful.

But in FreeCAD, maintainers themselves follow the GTD philosophy. That is application specific changes are more valuable than the overall health of the codebase. This leads to more features being developed without proper infrastructure (plumbing) to maintain them. As a result - more bugs and ever longer release cycles.

All attempts to establish rules so far failed - see "FreeCAD enhancement proposals" as the latest attempt. I don't think that there is such thing as "core devs". For sure, there are some guys who have repository admin rights, control the domain, website and forum, but I haven't seen any coordination wrt roadmap, releases, API stability, architecture etc.

[Kunda1]

Looks like @abdullah came through in issue #8120

[onekk]

Post amended, sorry for any inconvenience.

Regards

Carlo D.

[wmayer]

Note that the discussion is two years old.

[onekk]

Note that the discussion is two years old.

Sorry, I've seen the date of last answer from @Kunda1.
I wil amend my post.