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Hey guys, just wanted to document some of the things I think could be improved. Now these are my thoughts, like to know what everyone else thinks. I am using Mac version on 10.8

  • User Interface

    • For the MAC make more Mac like? Add Linux/Mac theme so Linux can look like Linux, Windows can look like Windows, and Mac looks a like a mac app. For that "polished look" and others could customize the look too with own created themes if they want.
    • Save and export screen, do you really need the big blue screen with logo? a Now saving to... would be ok
    • Apply & Ok buttons. Think it could be Apply and Cancel. Also Apply should SAVE the file!
    • Project Tree - Every time you save the tree expands! Should stay the way I left it. Looks very busy.
    • In App Help - Some form of help. Now days a lot of apps hook into the web for a online help, with an option to down load it for offline viewing.
    • Menus. Able to hide the ribbon menu? Able to show hide Panels with a tab (click tab it shows, mouse away from it, it closes)
    • Multi-Monitor Support - dialogs only open on primary monitor. I sometimes have ORMD on a big monitor and all the dialogs pop up on the other monitor!
    • Comments hide associations links. Maybe make comments objects blocking
  • Functions

    • Allow description of fields and tables(objects) to be shown. Maybe add a print view that lists out the objects in a table view with comments?
    • Allow description of fields and entities(objects) inside the php classes (Doctrine2/Symfony2) Would be very helpful with PHP annotations.
    • Printing from Mac! However the PDF does work as a work around
    • More printing options. Print just the visual diagram, print list of entities, print list of entities with fields, etc..

That's all for now :-) This should keep ya busy!

-Ken

in Feature Request by (200 points)
edited by

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Hi Ken,

thanks for comprehensive list of ideas and suggestions. I try to answer to each idea separately.

  • More mac/linux UI - UI heavily depends on Qt framework and I'm not sure if we're able to update it. We already ship several Ribbon themes. I'm not sure if it's possible to create more themes manually or customize whole app to look more as Linux/Mac app.

  • You're right, we can compact this is screen to smaller size.

  • We received several complains about Apply button and we decided to completely remove it. It's redundant and unnecessarily complicates UI. (Unfortunately Apply can't save to the file but only to model and this is the reason why we're going to remove it).

  • This is weird. I try it on my computer and I didn't observe such behavior. Can you please try to record screen with this behavior?

  • We already discuss this via email and as I wrote, it's definitely interesting idea. We will try to find a way how to bring some online documentation to app

  • You can already hide the ribbon, just press small arrow on top-right of the ribbon. Regarding the idea with tabs, I suppose you mean function similar to Visual Studio for example: http://screencast.com/t/lfYfQrXIyaGL .I have to check if Qt offers such feature and if so, we will add it.

  • Multi-monitor support. Behavior you described is caused by remembering last dialog position. When you open any dialog, ORM Designer tries to open it on position you previously close it. And if you add new monitor, ORM Designer is still trying to open it on last known position. I don't know if this can be solved in any way.

  • Comments hide associations links - Comments are always displayed in higher level than association links. I'm not sure what do you mean by "make comments objects blocking". Can you post some example image/collage?

And now to functions

  • Allow description to be shown - This is one of improvements we would like to introduce. Display some popups with additional info about objects.

  • Export descriptions to PHP We already discuss several ways here: http://support.orm-designer.com/58/feature-request-entity-field-descriptions-export-comments . Right now we're working on extending PHP generator to allow setters/getters and also we're preparing some routines which we will use to export descriptions/comments

  • Printing - We know.... we have to do some more work to bring Printing support back to ORM Designer. It's one of our top priority task

  • More printing options. We have some ideas how to extend ORM Designer with lot of new reports. But the key will not be in Printing but in separate modules export which will be fully customizable and extendable. This feature will offer to export / print / display a lot of reports in several formats (XML, HTML, TXT, .. ). We have already started discussion here: http://support.orm-designer.com/575/feature-request-simple-xslt-based-export-html-tabular-format

I hope I answered all your questions. As always, if you have any ideas in the future, don't hesitate to post them here.

by Skipper developer (141k points)
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Thanks for the always quick response :-)

Tree Before save

After save