feature list

[Brian H Wilson]

Basics - data organization
* move files
* rename files
* delete files
* copy files

Additional formats
* File geodatabase support (it can be on the list even if its not
possible yet)
* MrSID
* Text (.txt extension) files, they often ride along with data and
give useful information. At least list them, if not view them. Double
click to open in a text browser?
* PDF files - same thing. Allow listing and viewing even if geopdf's
are not handled

Option to show metadata instead of shape preview
or show both - allow two panels on right one for metadata and one for
shape

I am not sure how themes and databases features are supposed to work,
have not experimented yet. That causes me to add this one:

Help documentation

Allow filtering -- many things we could do here
* date ranges
* search metadata
* i suppose that was where you were going with themes too?
* Some way to show usage restrictions (and filter on them) would be
great, for example I have data from Linn County that is only for use
by Linn County firefighters, yet I'd like to keep it in the same
warehouse as all the other GIS data, for ease of maintenance and
backups etc.

Preview stuff (the right panel)
* allow user to disable preview
* instead of generating a preview on the fly, allow a background task
to generate thumbnail previews
* allow inserting a preview thumbnail manually
* generate preview on a separate thread so it does not lock up the
browser while it's being generated
* allow interrupting painting of the preview
* allow user to disable scroll wheel zoom (it causes anguish when you
have to wait for preview to update AGAIN)

--
Big picture -- perhaps make it more like a photo organizer?

Make it so useful that people who have access to ArcCatalog use GeoApt
in preference. I like that philosophy for open source in general --
don't make the goal be a free but inferior version of a commercial
product, instead take a different look at the problem and come up with
a better solution. "Better" can mean simple but elegant instead of
"includes 9000 tools you will never need". Open source does not have
to get market share or produce a new version every 12 months to keep
people signed up for maintenance contracts. We can pick the 10% most
required features of the commercial competitor and then just do those
10x better.

I use Digikam to organize my photos, and it does a lot of things I'd
love to be able to do in a GIS data browser. It maintains a database
about the images including thumbnails generated offline, It lets you
see various metadata / header information and to filter and sort based
on that metadata, it lets you add keywords to help sort and filter
images. Generally I think many of the features in a photo browser
would apply to a GIS data browser.

I played around with a copy of ArcSDE recently (I got it running on
CentOS/PostgreSQL). I need a practical way to store and organize a lot
of GIS data, not large files, just lots of them. SDE was of no real
help. It's just another big dusty warehouse I can throw data into. I
suppose the versioning would be useful if I could afford it but
versioning is coming to Postgis and the way its implemented in SDE
does not really address my needs.

I still consider myself a "relative newcomer" to GIS (time flies, been
using it almost 10 years now) but I am still amazed at how rough-edged
and incomplete things are in the GIS world.

Brian

[Brian H Wilson]

Move the preview controls to the top of the preview panel.

Make the pan tool be the default, esp if you ignore my suggestion to
disable scroll wheel -- then you can pan with click and drag and zoom
with wheel

Show scale and position on the preview panel frame

Pan operations should not always cause a repaint (when full extent of
layer is visible moving the cached image should be enough)

Allow sorting the directory listing by clicking on the column header

I have folders full of images, it would be great if there were a way
to automatically treat them as raster catalogs, assembling the preview
image area into a grid of the thumbnails. Might help me to select
rasters to drag and drop them into QGIS if they are spatially
organized instead of just listed by name. Also might help me to see
gaps in the coverage so I could know what tiles I need to download.

--
Brian