Intermediate "new project" dialog.
Closed this issue · 6 comments
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.
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:
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!
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:
- New project.
- Load project.
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.
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.