[instaviz-users] New User Suggestions...

[Glen Low]

Brian

On 09/01/2009, at 4:04 AM, Brian H wrote:

> I've been looking for a diagramming program for the iPhone and I was
> about to settle on (iBluesky or MindMaker) but happened to come across
> Instaviz and loved it (I've used GraphViz in the past and I think it
> is a great program)

Thanks for trying Instaviz!

> 1. EASY EDITING OF LABEL NAMES: When you double click a node,
> automatically highlight the label so a user can just start typing to
> change the name, instead of putting the cursor at the end of the label
> and forcing them to hit the X or backspace over all of the letters.
>
> 5. (probably hard to do)MULTILINE LABELS:  I noticed if I typed long
> labels they didn't wrap, so the boxes were these long one-line
> monstrosities.  I had to go and examine your diagrams to see how you
> were able to accomplish multiple lines in a box. I figured out you
> entered a '\n' to add a newline, would it be possible to enable the
> "enter/return" have it insert the '\n' and make the Label box
> multiline capable?

Your fundamental impulse appears to be easier editing of labels. I'm  
working on inline label editing for 2.0 which will make editing much  
easier overall, and hope to incorporate line breaks, akin to how SMS  
and AIM do it.

Ryan is correct that there's no way to select or even preselect a  
section of text in the iPhone, presumably because there's no cut and  
paste support either. I did one better than Apple's default  
implementation though: when you open a Settings screen in Instaviz,  
the first typeable field is focused, unlike with Apple apps which  
don't do this. I did this mainly to make label editing easier, because  
it saves you an additional tap. I could also blank out the label but  
that would not be desirable when all you wanted was to browse instead  
of edit.

> 2. EXPORT OPTIONS: I saw mention how the Apple API only allows text to
> be sent to the Mail app, so as a compromise, I was curious if it was
> possible to export to one of the disk systems (box.net, iDisk, WebDav)
> and then generate a URL what would point to it and send that to the
> email client (since it is only text).  If the storage systems are not
> easy to guess the URL, you could add a field for the user to enter the
> beginning of the URL and then prepend the filename to it. (then pass
> that to Mail)

That's an excellent idea! WebDAV URL's are supposed to be the same  
whether you read from them or write to them, so I could include a  
check box which allows this -- at least this would save the additional  
step of figuring out and manually copying out the URL.

If I have the time for a  1.3 version, it will go there, otherwise it  
may wait for the 2.0 rollup.
>
>
> 3. EXPORT TO PHOTOROLL:  I know that you hit (Home + Power) to take a
> screen shot that goes into the photoroll, where you can then email it
> off.  But why can't you just export a PNG to the photoroll?  This
> seems to be a much better option, you can get a much better sized
> graph that you can send someone and print, and it doesn't have the
> iPhone header and will allow for much larger graphs to be at a
> readable size.   (Both iBluesky and MindMaker seemed to have
> accomplished this)

It appears that exporting to the photoroll is only at low resolution,  
but I will certainly investigate this.
>
>
> 4. HORIZONTAL GRAPH LAYOUT:  It would be nice to have a toggle box to
> let the user layout the DOT Graph horizontally instead of just
> vertically.
>

Ditto comment to 2. -- it will be in 1.3 or 2.0.




Cheers, Glen Low


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