Re: Warning on unreleased versions.

[Alan Mead]

On 3/2/2016 1:35 PM, Friedrich Beckmann wrote:

Am 02.03.2016 um 20:26 schrieb John Darrington <address@hidden>:

On Wed, Mar 02, 2016 at 07:52:34PM +0100, Friedrich Beckmann wrote:

2 Then, as a first post-release task, let's replace the existing splash screen with an startup window
  which must be acknowledged.  Then we don't need to have any warning in the titlebar, or in the output window.

In SPSS there is such a screen, but it also had a checkbox that makes it go away permanently.  The splash screen could be similar. You could make the user acknowledge it once.

One good reason beyond this warning for doing so is that the current splash screen is not truly visible when I run PSPP on a fast machine. Friedrich explains that this was the desired behavior, but frankly on a fast machine it's weird to have a dialog whiz past without enough time to read it.

One good reason NOT to have a PSPPIRE splash screen (i.e. not to follow SPSS) is that the SPSS screen also has added functionality like allowing the user to re-open recently used syntax and data files. So, having a modal dialog without useful functionality adds no functionality.

Please, do not let us sacrifice functionality for this purpose. Nobody wants to acknowledge this. Nobody. Yes, nobody.
Please remember software that does want you to acknowledge something like this. You hate it. For good reason.

I don't disagree about annoyances but if you only needed to acknowledge it once, I don't think it would be so bad.  I don't use any of the SPSS "start-up dialog" functionality but I haven't banished it permanently because it's not a big deal to just hit cancel each time it appears (which is only when I first start SPSS).

About raising the output window, I notice that using 0.8.5, when I open a .SAV file from inside PSPPIRE, a warning (e.g., about encoding of the .SAV file) causes the output window to be raised over the data window.  This isn't so different from the behavior of raising the output window when this "unreleased version" warning is printed. 

But anyway, is this a big deal?  I don't think it's a big deal that a warning about the version is printed to the output window which isn't raised until the user raises it themself.  I also don't think it would be a big deal if the output window were raised once after this information was output. 

I also don't think it would be a big deal to also put this information on the splash screen, even if some people cannot read it.

-Alan

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