Before the release

[Bodia]

There are a few usability issues about Raptor which I'd like to outline
before the release of .98.

1) I have noticed that in latest version of Raptor in svn the refresh
rate of board arrows was increased. On my machine it uses a lot of CPU.
I don't think the users will like it, in my opition it's better to set
it to the level of .96

2) In the svn version, during right mouse click on Raptor's console very
often used commands (at least for me) like "finger", "variables",
"history" etc aren't easily accessible. It would be good to place it on
the top of the dialog as in BabasChess or Jin.

3) I often experience a situation when for example there is a text
"(NoiroP is observing game(s) 247)" in console and when I click on "247"
with right mouse button the ")" isn't filtered and I get something like
"observe 247)".

4) The default color scheme in the console didn't look good for me at
first, but I've used to it and now my opinion has changed. However, the
channel tells coloring by default would be very nice. I use #D3A932 for
it, fit very nicely. Additionally, default font size seems too big,
exceptionally on Linux with its ulgy fonts.

5) This is more a feature reguest than a bug, but anyway important. When
observing games it would be good to have All Observer tab like in
BabasChess.

These are most important problems I can say about Raptor on my platform.
There are also performance issues during the startup, but the fix will
be targeted for next releases I think.

[Carson Day]

1) I don't think it should be removed, but rather be a preference. Perhaps at a low frame rate by default, as it worked in .97a. It looks fantastic on my mac and I definitely don't want to remove it.

2) Yeah need to find a better approach there. Part of the problem is everyone wants it configurable and easy to use. Often these two are at odds with each other. Perhaps it wouldn't be to bad to have a "quick" command list that is outside of the cascading menu and then the cascading menu as well. That way its configurable as well as a little more usable. If you want to work on this one its not so bad. You would just have to add a new preference for the quick command list for fics/bics. Update RaptorPreferenceStore with the default settings. Add a method to Connector to retrieve them. And change ChatConsole to call that method when it builds the menus. Also if you want to take a crack at redoing the menus have at it. I also don't like the way they work now with sub-menus, but I didn't like how it worked before either. 

3) Yeah I run into this sometimes too ... its in ICSConnector.isLikelyGameId and ICSConnector.parseGameId if you want to fix it. Be careful though quite a lot of code runs through the methods in ICSUtils they both use. Perhaps there needs to be a new method just for game ids.

4) The colors are being fixed soon in Themes. If you know of better fonts that are fixed width you can add them to OTHER_MONOSPACED_FONTS in SWTUtils. It will use the first font it finds in that array.

   Default font size is extremely tricky. It varies depending on monitor resolution. If you want to play around with the font sizes you can. They are set in RaptorPreferenceStore.setDefaultMonitorBasedSizes(). It works great for what I use, but if you want to tweak it you can. You can also add in specific code for linux using OSUtils.isLikelyLInux(). I do want to review this though. I spent a lot of time figuring out the ideal sizes. For me they work well in all environments and different monitor sizes. 

5) There is an observes button and i really don't want to tab the boards at this point. I think it just adds clutter to the interface. I thought about this quite a lot when I originally designed the board. It also adds extraneous messages that need to be sent and parsed all the time during the game which can slow things down. The on demand Observers button is great for that I think.

Yeah it will always be a bit slow starting up. It might be time to add a splash screen to address that.

Also I am going to be busy adding Theme's and Layouts and fixing some windows xp bugs so I really don't have a lot of time to fix all of this by next week when I want to release 98RC1. I will do issue 1, because I know that code well and its a bit tricky. If you want to help out and fix some of the other ones that would be great. If you need a little info to get started let me know.

CDay

[Bodia]

Ok, I'll look on issue 3

[cday]

I reduced the number of frames from 25 to 10 for
arrow,higlights,results fade away. Let me know if that is still taking
up to much cpu.

Also I added in themes. If you have any you want ot add to the release
you can post the files here. They are stored in ~/.raptor/themes

I think it might take another week or two to get .98 released. I still
need to add layouts and work on some of the windows xp issues.

CDay

[Bodia]

Now it is okay. However, I can't find where to change the refresh rate
in preferences. Themes is a good feature, I've found one problem though:
already opened chat consoles don't repaint properly when changing a theme.

Also, maybe it's reasonable to initialize most expensive services only
when they are needed, not on start up? It would speed up starting a lot.

Bodia

[Carson Day]

Preferences -> ChessBoard -> Arrows

                                          -> Highlights

                                          -> Results

You can change the refresh rate on those pages. I decided not to make the # of frames an option, only the refresh rate. So you can speed up the fade away or slow it down.

The biggest hog is the Board cache service. I will take a look at it maybe we can just make it all multi threaded and have them init at staggered intervals.

CDay

[cday]

Changed the sub-menus around a bit. I think they are more usable now.
I added the quick person list i was talking about. Let me know what
you think.