Fwd: Problems encountered & feedback about UI design flaws

[tod Landis]

Hi Tod,

My apologies for not getting back to you sooner. I managed to get
Entrance running when you sent me the trial key, but I couldn't get it
to produce the kind of report-quality output I was looking for. The
learning curve was also a little steeper than I was hoping for.

As I used the application for the first time, I made notes on the
problems I ran into. I've included the notes below in case they're
useful. I look forward to trying out future versions as I think
there's a real need for a tool like Entrance. I've wanted to easily
create ad hoc charts and reports on MySQL databases for years!

Kind regards,
[withheld]

Notes from trial of Entrance:

I had to drop to the command-line and "java -jar" it to get it to run.

On startup, the window was sized so it was under my dock. Clicking
green arrow corrected it.

No idea what to click. New gives me a blank window, Open opens a file
dialog with GarageBand(!) tunes pre-selected.

Connect to a database freezes the application temporarily with no
indication of how long things will take.

Adding something to the 'WHERE clause' in the "plot a line graph"
dialog, doesn't include the "WHERE" word in the query, so generates an
SQL syntax error.

In the chart dialog; no clue *at all* what the difference is between
"OK" and "draw" and why I would click one over the other.

It generated a chart, but the datetime fields on the X axis all merged
over each other and were not readable.

Subsequent attempts to generate a chart result in the application
freezing.

[withheld]

[tod Landis]

Thank you for the feedback, and my comments are
interspersed below.
- Tod

> Notes from trial of Entrance:
>
> I had to drop to the command-line and "java -jar" it to get it to run.

Please download and try again. Not sure, but this was probably an
incompatibility between Entrance and an Apple Java upgrade that we
fixed.
When you run Entrance as a Macintosh application, instead of a jar,
you get
additional functionality,eg. SQL scripts can be opened by dragging
them
to the Entrance icon.

>
> On startup, the window was sized so it was under my dock. Clicking
> green arrow corrected it.

I'll try to duplicate this.

>
> No idea what to click. New gives me a blank window, Open opens a file
> dialog with GarageBand(!) tunes pre-selected.

Clicking "New" gives you a blank tab, ready for entering a SQL script.
"Open" is for opening an existing SQL script.

You can also use File | Add a folder... to add a file folder to the
Entrance
tree. With a folder selected in the tree, "Save as..." will position
the file chooser
there for saving SQL scripts, and you can double click SQL scrpts in
the tree
to open them.

> Connect to a database freezes the application temporarily with no
> indication of how long things will take.

Problem is we don't know how long it will take. Entrance should give
you a
cancel button when a connection takes a few seconds though.

Couple of other notes that may help...

Many users run Entrance with a local copy of MySQL. Set up
that way they can take a snapshot into the local MySQL db from a
remote
server, preserving the same schema structure. This avoids the network
latency
issues, and they can run the same SQL queries on the local
and remote machines

You can also "test" remote connections, with a cancel button, from
the "Set Connection properties" dialog.

> Adding something to the 'WHERE clause' in the "plot a line graph"
> dialog, doesn't include the "WHERE" word in the query, so generates an
> SQL syntax error.

We could (and should) insert WHERE when the user hasn't.

Our real strength, though, is when you switch to editing the SQL
tab and then pressing Cmd+Enter on the Mac to redraw. You can
very quickly change WHERE clauses, GROUP BYs and so on
for a different type of "what if" analysis.

> In the chart dialog; no clue *at all* what the difference is between
> "OK" and "draw" and why I would click one over the other.

Yes, it is confusing: "OK" means "draw and close the dialog".
"Draw" means "draw and retain the dialog".
(We're working on changes).

> It generated a chart, but the datetime fields on the X axis all merged
> over each other and were not readable.

There's an example showing how to avoid overlapping labels in
a time series chart here http://dbentrance.com/blog/?p=95

The basic idea is that you can control the number of axis labels,
using
"ONLY", as in: ONLY 5 AXISLABELS

You can also reduce the default font size using FONT, eg.
FONT "sans serif" plain 10

>
> Subsequent attempts to generate a chart result in the application
> freezing.

This is where it would help if we could connect by phone. The most
likely
cause is that connection was lost. However, I wouldn't expect a click
on the
draw button to kill the UI, ie. you should still be able to click NEW
and get a
new script.

Thank you very much for the feedback. We will make improvements using
it...
- Tod