[Orekit Developers] [SOCIS] comments on 2011-08-29 apk

[Luc Maisonobe <Luc.Maisonobe@c-s.fr>]

Hello Alexis,

We are sorry for the delay on commenting your latest version, we were
quite busy.

This version brought lots of improvements on the usability of the
application, thanks.

The new handling for the vector input is really good. I just noticed
some weird behavior when attempting to type a velocity after having
input a position. The next field after pos.z was vel.z while I would
have expected it to be vel.x. Also the next field after vel.{x,y,z} did
not work. I guess this is the same thing you mentioned in your August
29th message. It would also be really fine to have the same behavior for
other forms, like latitude/longitude/altitude fields in station coordinates.

By the way, there is no way to input altitude in station coordinates. It
would be nice to add this.

The favorites management is really is good thing. Two awkward things are
that you cannot edit an entry (you can however delete it and recreate
it) and you have only one selection chance. I would have expected that
when you are on an input form (say for a ground station) and you have
two or three stations available in the list on the bottom of the screen,
selecting one station would simply fill in the fields in the above form
and this would allow both changing the values afterward (possibly saving
the new values) or selecting another station. Using the station would
always be done by using the existing OK button. For now, when you select
a station it immediately takes the values and close the form, just as if
you had also pressed the OK button.

I think a tabular presentation for orbits would be nice. The one line
fields is difficult to read.

I will remove the getClassLoader() part in the Classpath crawler as per
your patch if this does not work on Android. Thanks for the patch!

My last comment about UI is the tabular output for eclipses. There is a
big black horizontal bar on some cells (entry or exit). From the top of
my head I think also the entry and exit events for eclipses are not
gathered in a single row as station events are (I'm not sure though, I
do not have my tablet near as I write this mail).

I guess the previous comments are the last ones about the UI. So once
they are taken into account, it would be interesting to look at the 2D
orbit display.

best regards,
Luc