This week, I learned about a fantastic tool integrated into Visual Studio called Spy++.  Many people are (painfully?) familiar with this tool, but it is new to me.  Spy++ allows you to target a UI component in a GUI application, and it will then show you a stack trace of that component.  It has already helped me a ton in figuring out how the VISTAS UI code works, as I can identify specifically what class each UI component represents and jump right to the code which generates it.  

Just a taste of Spy++.

I also sat down with the application and had another brainstorm session on desired features that are within the scope of this project, which I’ll enumerate here.

VISTAS UI Ideas

Short term:

• Fix the “Add” buttons on the Data & Visualizations tabs. Right-clicking is not intuitive to a new user. This could be simple as a small “+” or “Add” button next to
• Project Visualizations/Project Data.
• Add ability to delete items from Data & Visualizations tabs. Currently, removing a scene requires rebooting VISTAS.
• Cleanup of VISTAS .ico file — remove white pixels from edge of image to beautify
• Change default icon in titlebar of main window frame to be the VISTAS icon
• Tooltips/mouse hover context information need to be added across the board.

Medium term:

• Add “Help” section with integrated quick start guide
• Revamp the Tool Bar. Re-evaluate overall layout, icon choices and functionalities present.

Longer Term:

• Revamp the Menu Bar. Right now there is a bare minimum of functionality here, and several existing buttons don’t work.
• “About” as its own item, and not nested under File — to be discussed.
• Functionality to Save & Open projects needs to be implemented.  Nik has assigned himself to this.
• Functionality to close the current project/create a new project needs to be implemented.
• Adding/removing Viewers could perhaps be done in a more intuitive way.
• Bundle a small sample data set with VISTAS so that a new user can experiment with the program without committing to downloading a large data set & going through all the steps of setting up the visualization. Ideally this would come in the form of a sample project include with VISTAS, so the ability to Save & Open projects needs to be implemented first.
• Ability to take a screenshot of the viewer window, either via right-click or perhaps a button in the toolbar. Ability to copy screengrabs to clipboard for easy insertion into documents/emails/whatever.
• Optional camera controls on the viewer window might be nice. At least a zoom control– Shift+mouse zooming is not always intuitive nor precise for fine camera movements.
• Ability to click on colors in Legend and change them.

— whew!  I better get to work.