search

mastodon-sc / mastodon

Mastodon – a large-scale tracking and track-editing framework for large, multi-view images.
BSD 2-Clause "Simplified" License
67 stars 20 forks source link

Intermediate "new project" dialog. #53

Closed tpietzsch closed 3 years ago

tpietzsch commented 6 years ago

It is at the moment probably unclear to new users that the File Dialog popping up when "new project" is clicked means "Select a BDV file with image data". It would be good to instead have a dialog open, with a (appropriately) file field for the BDV file, and then once a fitting file was selected enabling "OK"/"Create project" button on the dialog.

tpietzsch commented 6 years ago

@tinevez I assigned this issue to you for now...

tinevez commented 6 years ago

I would instead completely remove the Load project and New project buttons from the Main window. All the buttons on this window are relative to editing or saving the current project.

I would make separate commands to start a new project or load one, that would then launch and show the main window. From these commands we have then the leisure to make a clear and explicit GUI. I was thinking of something like I did for the TGMM import in MaMuT:

capture

tpietzsch commented 6 years ago

Yes, very good point!

I think the current MainWindow happened because we are starting it up stand-alone from Eclipse, not from the Fiji Plugins menu (as it will eventually be). In principle, I'm fine with removing those buttons and making a proxy Meta-MainWindow that serves as a launchpad when running stand-alone from Eclipse (could be an empty window with just the plugin menu entries). My feeling is that we should retain the capability to run stand-alone without bringing up Fiji. For one thing, it forces us to keep hygiene with dependencies. Mastodon (core) should be as self-contained as possible. scijava-common as a dependency is fine. imagej-common not so much...

I think this is a bigger change than it first looks, but I like this direction very much!

tinevez commented 6 years ago

You are totally right that Mastodon should be standalone. Actually I was thinking of distributing it with Icy as well. So no ImageJ-common there...

As you, rather than plugin commands I was thinking of a "welcome" GUI - or Meta-MainWindow -with just two buttons:

Later, we can put some clever detection-fu scheme that finds in what context Mastodon was launched (standalone, Fiji, Icy) and decorates the meta-main-window. But let's do this laaaaaater.

ctrueden commented 6 years ago

You are totally right that Mastodon should be standalone. Actually I was thinking of distributing it with Icy as well. So no ImageJ-common there...

Why can Icy not consume imagej-common?

Does imagej-common bring anything of value to the table for this project? If so, this dependency should be usable even in "standalone" mode. And if not for some reason, let's discuss.

tpietzsch commented 6 years ago

@ctrueden Just to clarify: I mentioned imagej-common as a random example. My point was to keep dependencies to a minimum. scijava-common is valuable to for the context/plugin system so we should have this as a dependency.