Sorry to express ignorance Christopher- I probably should know but remind
me, what is GUI?
And you have the 'Revert to saved' option in Project menu in N4 and N5 -
which might undo a few recent tasks when you are embarassed about your
mistakes. Correct me if I'm wrong - but I don't believe MS Access has an
'Undo' button either. Is Access a GUI designed program?
Are there any of this type of qualitative analysis database packages which
have an undo button? I only know a few - but none of these has an Undo
button.
On the subject of coded information in the margin, whilst I am not
particularly rooting for QSR products above any others - QSR developed NVivo
to redress the lack of margin dispay info in N4 and had good reasons
(economy and speed of processing- might be two??) for leaving it out of N5.
Both N4 and N5 have continued to be developed and supported for other good
reasons.
I do see your point about the closeness of the menu options Examine coding
and Remove coding -there are other close menu options in other softwares
which can have tragic consequences for the health of your project - 'Unlink
quotations' and 'Unlink all quotations' come to mind in ATLAS.ti, right next
door to each other - (don't try the second one at home).
I think Christopher has started a useful 'constructive critique'- because
as we know developers are VERY responsive to calls of this nature. Perhaps
changing the order of menu options is a very easy thing to fix?
On the subject of N5 I'd like to see the 'Make new tree node' (i.e.
sub-node) - closer to the node selected - instead of which its nearly10cm
'North' of the original cursor selection.
Any requests for other changes in these or other softwares?
Ann Lewins
Christopher Strauss says...
> Has anyone figured out how to UNDO anything in N5? That feature
(considered
> essential by every GUI designer I know of, beginning with Ben
> Shneiderman...) is nowhere to be found, and you REALLY need it due to some
> other poorly designed aspects of the menu system. Since N5 still does not
> have the relatively essential ability to display currently applied codes
to
> a given text segment (like Atlas/Ti) while you continue to code, you have
to
> constantly right-click on text segments to get to "Examine Selection's
> Coding." In complete defiance of all interface design logic, "Remove
> Selection's Coding" is about two pixels south of it, making the error of
> uncoding what you only wanted to inspect annoyingly frequent, and without
> UNDO, unrecoverable! I would consider using the keyboard shortcut if it
> wasn't the same as the "Cut" command on EVERY other Windows app I have
ever
> seen, and use constantly, making it a lousy habit to acquire. Now if the
> shortcut keys could be re-assigned closer to Windows-standard in the
> options... Do all of these packages suffer from such non-standard GUI
> design?
> Flame Off.
>
> Christopher Strauss, MSLS
> Interdisciplinary Information Science PhD student
> University of North Texas SLIS
>
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