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Hi Dave,
The lack of toggling of full screen mode is a bug that we will fix. I would say the rest is Mac/Java weirdness. Basically, we just make w very big window that is placed at (0,0) screen coordinates (upperFor the last several weeks I've been muddling through my first attempt to teach some of our meteorology majors how to use the IDV, using the Mac G4 laptops running OS X (v10.9.3, Panther) in our computer labs. We've stumbled across several anomalies that I'll call "bugs", though whether these bugs are in the IDV, in Apple's implementation of Java, in the interaction between the two, or in the users (us), I'll let you decide. (1) In the View menu, when we select "Full Screen", we get a full screen all right, but in most cases we don't get the menu bar across the top of the display window. In the one exception I've seen (a student's privately owned Mac G4 laptop, also running OS X v10.3.9, I think) the upper left corner of that menu bar has a button that returns the view to non-Full Screen view, but on our machines we don't see that. I have a Mac Cube running OS X 10.4.3 (Tiger) in my office that shows most of a menu bar in Full Screen mode, but nothing happens when I click on the spot where I think button should be. We discovered by trial and error that when we're in Full Screen mode, pressing <Option>V pulls down the View menu, but clicking on the "Full Screen" item in that menu doesn't toggle Full Screen mode back off. (This is what I think should be called a bug--all the other toggle items in the View menu have a check mark beside them when they're on, and they truly do toggle something on and off.) The same is true in the couple of instances (the student's Mac G4 laptop and my Mac Cube) where we can actually see the View menu in Full Screen mode--that is, we can pull down the View menu and click on "Full Screen", but nothing happens
left). We will try to do something that is "Mac" sensitive.
That's not quite a bug but a feature. There are sort of two classes of things that are being shared here - the viewpoint state and the time animation. By default, all time animation is shared, irrespective of the windows. However, when you create a 2 pane display the display state is only shared between those two displays.(2) When we have two separate displays open, and one display has two panes and the other has one pane, and "Shared Views" is turned on on all displays, the two separate displays don't share rotation, panning, and zooming (though they do share animation controls). On the other hand, the two panes in the two-pane display do share these controls.
The sharing is "group" based. All a group is is a name (e.g., "Animation"). For the linked multi display windows the group is a big unique number.In the latest development release we provide the user the ability to change the
share group in a display and in an animation. For example, to address your above problem you could change the name of the group in each of the displays to some group name, .e.g. "Group1". You do this through the Projections->Set Share Group menu.
This sound like a Java heavyweight vs. lightweight component problem. The 3D display component is heavyweight and does not play well with lightweight components. On Linux the tooltip is not a problem. We will note this but I'm not sure if we can engineer a solution for it.(3) The mouse-over identifier labels on the Viewpoint Toolbar and Navigation Toolbar (that is, the labels that appear next to an icon when the mouse lingers on the icon) should appear on top of the display window frame and the (normally) black display window so that we can read the mouse-over label. They do appear on top of the display window frame but the portion of the label that should lie on top of the display window itself is hidden, as if it lies beneath the display window. As a result we can see only part of the identifier label.
That is indeed a bug and we'll fix it. You can change the value by dragging the slider.(4) When we plot an isosurface of a 3D field (say, temperature or wind speed) from a NAM model forecast file (say), and decide to change the isosurface value, in the display control window we enter a new value in the isosurface value entry box and press the return key. As a result, the value entered there is decremented by 1 (or incremented by 1 if the value is negative) and the isosurface is then plotted with the decremented value. (I don't see any other way to signal to the IDV to replot with the new isosurface value.)
You could also enter a value 1 greater than you want :-)
Not being Mac people (i.e., Don and I) we haven't had a chance to deal with many of these issues so please bear with us. We have had issues where a Control-click is interpreted(5) In general, for single-button mice (or click pads on Mac G4 laptops, for example), the right button on a two- or three-button mouse is simulated by holding down the <Option> key and clicking with the single button [<Option>click]. In the IDV, this works for zooming [<Shift><Option>click] and rotating [<Option>click] a display. However, with a two- or three-button mouse, panning is achieved with <Cntl>right-click. I would have thought that the equivalent on our one-button laptops would be <Cntl><Option>click, but this doesn't work--the cursor can be moved but the display doesn't follow.
as some other kind of mouse click which is probably what is happening here.We will look into this but, short of a revamp of our key/mouse click functions,
there might not be much we can do.
The panning icons on the Navigation Toolbar produce large panning jumps, and while the arrow keys produce smaller jumps those jumps are still far from smooth. Hence there seems to be no way to produce a smooth pan.
Good point. We will make the panning arrows use smaller increments.
These are relatively small problems, and the students are for the most part blown away by what they can do with the IDV. One student, who teaches our one-unit non-majors intro lab course for us, has immediately begun integrating some of what she learns about the IDV into the lab exercises that she designs each week.
Great. We always appreciate hearing good news. -Jeff