[sword-devel] Beta Z bugs

[Chris Little]

On Wed, 28 Aug 2002, Daniel Freedman wrote:

> 1. Catholic Encylopedia & Josephus' Works do not download and cause errors,
> causes Install Mngr to crash... (win xp pro)

I removed CathEn, since the module itself had been removed a while ago.
Josephus works fine for me.  Are you using at least version 1.5.3?  If 
not, that would cause a problem.

> 2. The locked module interface is extremely un-userfriendly

They're also not a feature for users currently.

> 4. Colours, the overall windows colours should be compatible with windows,
> on windows xp the window colours look ugly.

I think the fix for this is to turn off that hideous XP theme and to apply 
the Classic theme instead. :)  David had some kind of file that made Sword 
adopt XP themes.  Do you still have that David?

> 5.  There needs to be a far clearer indication of which module is selected
> in each of the 3 categories.

What would you propose we do?  I'm not sure there's much more to be done 
besides standard tab behavior.

> 6.  "Preferences" should be under "tools"

Why? Preferences are not a tool.  They hold options.
MSIE puts it in tools; that's wrong.  Mozilla puts it under Edit; that's 
wrong.  Some other programs put it under File; that's wrong.  File I can 
mostly forgive since that's where a lot of semantically inappropriate 
stuff of high importance gets stuffed.  But since we have enough options 
items to make an options menu, we should include preferences in the 
semantically correct category.

> 7. the various options are clumsy, and should be grouped in a more logical
> manner - transliteration, vowel pointers cantillations - maybe by language,
> Hebrew under a subheading, rather than simply lumped together

We should figure something out for this in 1.5.5.  Because of the way 
Sword handles these filters, it would take some work to sort them out this 
time around.  For many users, adding categories will just add extra steps.  
Suppose a user only wants the KJV and some dictionaries.  He'll have 
Strong's & Footnotes options.  If they're under an additional category, 
that's a lot more work to get to the options that would never have been 
confusing if they were just left alone on the Options menu.

> 8. The Toolbar should be windows based, and there should be more buttons

Not sure what this means.

> 14.  For inclusion, I recommend that people should have standard - BDB,
> Thayers, RSV, personal, TSK and Perhaps WHNU with NA27 Variants, the BHS as
> well....thats worth it, and quite frankly, everyone else is doing the KJV &
> MHCC included, and generally people have it anyway, and they can install
> it...rather be different and include some texts of real use....

Real use... to you.  Not all users are you.  Most can't make any use of 
Greek or Hebrew, so it shouldn't be pushed on them.  The distro with 
modules should be a minimum set used by our majority of users.

Our top 5 modules are KJV, AKJV, StrongsGreek, MHC, and StrongsHebrew.  I
would suggest we drop AKJV, substitute Thayer for StrongsGreek, substitute
BDB for StrongsHebrew, and add either of Easton or Smith.  Easton has a
small advantage over Smith in downloads.  Plus Personal, of course.

> 18.  Install manager downloads one module at a time.

Can you propose a reason why we would want anything else?
 
> 19. Copying Unicode to a program like word is a problem, it doesn't work
> correctly....

More specifically, RTL text with wordbreaks pastes incorrectly.  It looks 
like some confusion is occurring between Word and MS's RTF control.  
There's not much we can do about it.

> 20. There should be an option to alternate between RTL and LTR in the
> windows

Why?  Would you ever want to make an RTL script be viewed LTR, or vice 
versa?

> 22. There needs to be better error handling, if a module doesn't work, the
> conf. file should automatically be moved to a spare directory, and the
> program should be restarted, or a better warning message given...or both....

Modules that are public shouldn't have fatal errors.
Modules that are beta, are beta.

> 23.  A distinction between commentaries and other texts (enoch/BoM/quran)
> needs to be in place...perhaps force the other texts onto another row...
> same with the watchwords/daily readings as opposed to dictionaries and
> lexicons - having so many modules is getting irritating at having to find
> the right one (and yes i need many of them open at once...)...

The addition of GenBooks to the Commentary pane was a quick fix of Troy's.  
The alternative was to not support them in BibleCS until the rewrite.

--Chris