More flexible Guide display siz
Currently, the Guide displays in a small window that has a minimal amount of resizing available - only its vertical size can be modified, and that only slightly. Sizing of this window should be much more flexible. A user should be able to change its vertical and horizontal dimensions without some abritrary limit imposed. I have a display that is large relative to the size of the ESPlanner and the Guide windows, but with the restricted size of the Guide display, I cannot view a significant part of a particular topic without scrolling the text. It's a bit like looking through a knot-hole in a wooden fence - I get only one restricted glimpse at a time instead of being able to scan the whole topic.
In terms of prioritizing developer resources, this issue is not as important as substantive planning technology, but it is a continuing annoyance and detraction from the real essence of ESPlanner.
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As an alternative to the guide would you find firing up a web browser to display the guide information more or less intrusive? Many products now do this. I have mixed feelings, but this would make creating, maintaining, and updating the guide substantially easier.
We could go with a local version of the files so that an internet connection wouldn't be needed (my personal preference should we do this) or have guide information on-line and require an internet connection to access the guide. I find the latter contradictory given that the current ESPlanner products are all stand-alone but some very big players (Adobe, Apple, etc) do just this.
Best,
Dick Munroe
A web browser is sort of the universal display container, so it makes good sense to me that ESPlanner would issue an Open for its Guide's local (in the install directory or a subdirectory of it) main web page for all its documentation, causing whatever browser was the local default for that user to fire up and begin displaying the ESPLanner Guide. The Guide, organized with helpful hypertext and a search capability based on what the browser has to offer would be highly navigable. I don't have experience issuing coordinating calls from an application, but having the Guide in a browser and having it able to continuously track the topics being addressed in ESPlanner would be great. If I had that capability, I might even want to be able to specifically open the Guide independent of the action in ESPlanner so that that second instance could be used for more ad hoc Guide viewing - in other words: one instance of the Guide opend by selecting it from inside ESPlanner and a second instance not have any hyperlinks from ESPlanner driving it.
A PDF format Guide would also work, but html hyperlinking might be more flexible.
Either way, it does seem clear that letting some other application (web browser or Adobe Acrobat Reader) handle display would let you focus on more essential problems and solutions.
BillCool wrote:Currently, the Guide displays in a small window that has a minimal amount of resizing available - only its vertical size can be modified, and that only slightly. Sizing of this window should be much more flexible. A user should be able to change its vertical and horizontal dimensions without some abritrary limit imposed. I have a display that is large relative to the size of the ESPlanner and the Guide windows, but with the restricted size of the Guide display, I cannot view a significant part of a particular topic without scrolling the text. It's a bit like looking through a knot-hole in a wooden fence - I get only one restricted glimpse at a time instead of being able to scan the whole topic.
In terms of prioritizing developer resources, this issue is not as important as substantive planning technology, but it is a continuing annoyance and detraction from the real essence of ESPlanner.
The guide is actually in a web browser now. People I've spoken to generally don't use the Guide. I wonder if there is a consensus on it's usefulness we could discern from here? aka Do people like the guide or hate it?
I restricted the window size just to make it match the previous Guide (which was not HTML). Probably could be changed. Part of the problem is that the HTML version is a lot less flexible that the old one. (It was a victim of Vista so it is not coming back).
lwilliams wrote:The guide is actually in a web browser now. People I've spoken to generally don't use the Guide. I wonder if there is a consensus on it's usefulness we could discern from here? aka Do people like the guide or hate it?
I restricted the window size just to make it match the previous Guide (which was not HTML). Probably could be changed. Part of the problem is that the HTML version is a lot less flexible that the old one. (It was a victim of Vista so it is not coming back).
How about running a poll and see if we can get some consensus?
Best,
Dick Munroe