[ptx] thoughts for hugin UI, post 0.5

[Rob Park]

On 6/3/05, Bruno Postle <bruno at postle.net> wrote:
> 1. The "Images" and "Camera and Lens" tabs are the wrong way around.
> 
> The camera attributes (type, a, b, c, fov etc..) are independent of
> anything else, in principle they can be known immediately after
> first loading the images - So they should be in the first tab where
> the images are loaded.
> 
> Whereas the roll, pitch and yaw for the photos is generally not
> known until after optimisation - This information isn't interesting
> when you start a project and should be on a later tab.

I think I agree with this one.

> The "feature matching (autopano)" box on the first tab is unrelated
> to everything else, shouldn't it be on the "control points" tab?

Agreed.

> 2. There are settings on the last "stitcher" tab that are not really
> related to stitching and are more related to to the project itself.
> 
> The output type (and to some extent the "field of view") is critical
> to the optimisation step and often needs to be adjusted early on.

I was kinda thinking that those didn't belong on a "stitcher" tab when
I started this thread, but I couldn't really put it into words and I
wasn't sure where else to put it so I just left it.

> I'd like an additional "panorama" tab that contained the following:

I think it could use a better name than "panorama" tab because that's
kind of redundant. Maybe "preview" tab, but that could get confusing
with having both a preview window and a preview tab... maybe just
abolish the preview window entirely and have a preview tab.

> - Pull down menu to set the panorama type.
> 
> - A small preview similar to the existing preview popup.
> 
> - "Fit" button to adjust the field of view.
> 
> - field of view boxes to set this manually.
> 
> - "centre horizontally" button (same as in the preview).
> 
> - "centre vertically" button.

I agree with all of this so far, for a "preview" tab to replace the
preview window.

> - I'd quite like an interactive tool to manually pan, roll and zoom
>   everything.  I currently do this by guessing values for the anchor
>   image which is awkward at best.

Yeah! A lot of times I'll have a 270 degree pano, and in the preview
window, image 1 starts in the middle, then it goes to the right, off
the right edge and wrapping onto the left edge of the output image,
that's crap, and guessing the proper anchor to get it centered
properly is hard. Being able to just say "no, put it here" instead of
having to guess which image to anchor on would be great. Better yet,
an automatic "figure out where the gap is" button would be nice.

> - The panodruid stuff from the old preview can go here.

Does anybody really use the druid? I don't think it could ever be as
useful as the various tutorials out there, I say just drop the druid.

At least, the druid should be put into some kind of help menu that
would be accessible from all tabs, to give you advice at every step of
the way, not just when you're looking at the preview.

Also, it should really be possible to zoom in on the preview. I mean,
I know the preview is supposed to be a low quality draft thing, but
when I've got a particularly wide pano, it just scales it down to fit
the window and you can't see anything at all because it's just so damn
small.

> The "Stitcher" tab would lose the panorama type selector and the
> "field of view" boxes, and only show stuff related to rendering and
> post-processing.

Agreed.

-- 
Urban Artography
http://artography.ath.cx