[kepler-dev] Ptolemy II UI

[xiaowen]

Hi All,

After meeting with customers for SPA and watching them play with Ptolemy 
II, we noticed a couple of small annoyances with the Ptolemy II UI.

1. If you right-click on an actor and select "Configure Ports", make 
some changes to the ports, then close the window without clicking 
"Apply" or "Commit" first, Ptolemy II will happily close the window and 
discard all changes.  This happened many times during our session where 
we clicked the little 'X' in the corner to close the window, and had to 
redo all our port configuration.  It would be nicer if a window popped 
up warning users that changes will be discarded, and giving them the 
opportunity at that time to save the changes.

2. The "Skip remaining errors" button doesn't seem to always appear and 
doesn't skip all remaining errors.  As an example of this, take a model 
created in Ptolemy II 4.0-beta and open it in Ptolemy II 3.0.2.  The 
first error dialog gives me the "Skip remaining errors" button, but when 
I click it, I'm still confronted with a series of error dialogs, where 
I'm forced to continue clicking "Skip element" many times before the 
model gets displayed.  It would be nice if there were a button to click 
that would skip errors of all kinds and just go ahead and display the 
model to the best of its ability.


Do you all think it would be worthwhile to make these changes to Ptolemy 
II or Kepler?

I don't how hard it would be to implement them.  I'm guessing that the 
first change would require modifying 
ptolemy/actor/gui/PortConfigurerDialog.java to change the behavior upon 
closing the dialog.

I'm not sure how close Ptolemy II is now to its final 4.0 release, but 
if it's still accepting small UI fixes, these might be good candidates =)


Thanks,
Xiaowen