Posted by
dscho on
URL: http://imagej.273.s1.nabble.com/FigureJ-tp5002527.html
Hi Jérôme (and other FigureJ fans),
I finally had time to play with FigureJ. Nice job! It provides important
functionality and is most likely going to be a very important tool for my
work.
Since you seemed to prefer feedback over code contributions when we talked
about open software development in Luxembourg, here a couple of comments
instead:
- the user interface is mostly intuitive, however, I had to watch a video
tutorial (without sound because of a quiet office) to know how to resize
the selection. Handles (these little white boxes on ImageJ selections'
corners) would help that tremendously.
- likewise, I did not think of the "OK" button to get the image into the
panel. I closed the image instead; that did not do what I expected...
maybe it should?
- speaking of resizing the selection: it is always relative to the center.
Sometimes it is easier to resize relative to a corner or a side, though,
e.g. for screenshots.
- at one stage I had a FigureJ selection (i.e. this red-blue rectangle) in
the FigureJ window itself. That was a bit distracting, and I was only
able to remove it via the Image>Overlay menu. I *think* it was triggered
by my clicking on some FigureJ tool icons in the toolbar while the FigureJ
window was in the foreground.
- I Mavenized the source code, just to see whether it was really hard
(spoiler: it wasn't, see
https://github.com/dscho/FigureJ). It
demonstrated a problem: since IJ 1.47g, the ColorPicker is no longer a
Frame, but a Dialog. Thus, the code did not compile, and it cannot reuse
the color picker in any case (WindowManager.getFrame("CP") will never be
able to obtain the color picker anymore).
- there appear to be 3 different panels involved, the New/Open/Save one,
the one containing the "open image" button and the one to add labels and
scale bars. Would it not be nicer to have a single window with
appropriately grayed-out fields?
- double-clicking on a panel could open the image... that would make it a
bit more intuitive than having to get the Figure Control panel into the
foreground and to click the "open image" button.
- when I clicked "open image", it would automatically open the Macro
Recorder, too. A bit distracting...
- speaking of the Options panel: it looks quite different from the video
tutorial... maybe worth updating?
- just like the three different panels, I imagine it'd be better to have a
single tool, not three (I did not figure out what the second tool was
meant to do anyway)? Double-clicking that tool could bring the FigureJ
panel into focus.
- at some stage I had to reorder the images. It would be nice if a drag 'n
drop would exchange panels' images (and I'd suggest to keep the zoom
factor and the center intact in case of different panel dimensions, so
that exchanging two panels again would undo the exchange). Even looking
at the source code of the serialized .figurej file does not seem to help
because the LeafPanel class conflates the information about the position
in the figure with the information about what is displayed there.
- speaking of serialization: it often looks like a neat way to solve the
storage problem. That overlooks the fact, though, that it essentially
prevents any future changes in the data structures (otherwise the
serialized data cannot be read).
- speaking of drag 'n drop: it is nice that the panels can be resized by
dragging the separator lines. However, I had to watch a video tutorial
to know that I can do that. It might be a good idea to change the cursor
when it hovers on top of a separator, to double-arrows (as it is the
case for so many existing programs where a separator can be moved).
- should the "remove" button in the label panel not decrease the label
counter so that drawing an "A", removing it, and then clicking the
"draw" button again would draw an "A" again instead of a "B"?
- the Alt+Click to reset the label counter is too magic (read:
unintuitive), and it does not even work on Linux: you have to hit
Ctrl+Alt+Click. It should be a "reset" button; that would make things
intuitive.
- the labels can be hard to read. Maybe an option to display them in
Outline mode (i.e. add a background-colored border by using dilation)
would help.
- speaking of labels: quite often, I find myself wanting to add labels to
all panel at the identical location, "numbered" in the order we read and
write English: left-to-right, top-to-bottom (in that order). Maybe there
could be an option for that, too?
- I saw that "Image>Get Info" on the FigureJ window shows a bit of
information about the current figure, but I did not see a way to
reinitialize FigureJ from that info (that is stored e.g. when writing as
TIFF). Maybe a good idea?
I will stop here because I realize that it is already a metric ton of
feedback that you might want to digest before I go on... ;-)
Ciao,
Johannes
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