[Gambas-user] Improving the utility of IDE work flow.

[richard terry]

As part of my on-going experience with using the editor extensively this is 
another observation for a small improvement in usability.

As a prelude I'll make this comment so you know I'm not just talking through 
my hat.

I worked for a number of years (admittedly a number of years ago) writing vb 
medical records projects - eg pathology ordering, prescriptions, diabetes 
stuff, plus a contacts database for our local GP organisation and  an entire 
vb medical record project of my own, and made many observations re utility of 
programs over the years.

I've been paid quite a bit over a number of years to analyse the usability of 
medical records programs, and in the last couple of years was involved with a 
comparison of four major commercial offerings (where I was paid both as part 
of a large group, and separately as an independant consultant , to evaluate 
utility of programs to used in after hours, and aged care residential 
facilities in Newcastle)

As part of my independant review, I ran these 4 programs,  and my own (which 
is optimised for maximal workflow with minimal keypresses)   simultaneoulsy 
side by side in a virtual machine, and kept track of their work flow, and 
just how many mouse events, key presses etc, it took to do a similar task in 
each one.

For prescriptions eg one program (Yes - it was mine) could take as little as 
2-3 key presses to generate an entire script - consisting of 
drug/generic/quantities/repeats/dosages/indications/instructions, versus the 
usual number of events (up to about 17 or more) generated by the commercial 
programs. Over a day, in my environment, this adds up to many many thousands 
of extra mouse or keyboard events.

So with reference to Gambas IDE, setting it up so as to allow the user 
flexibilty with the minimal number of keypresses and easiest navigation is of 
great interest to me.

Given that when one is programming intensively, and has say finished for the 
moment, or closes gambas to re-open again for some reason, it would be nice 
to have gambas open the project to its last used state, which in my hands 
here, it dosnt seem to do (1138 version)

My project now has around 70 modules and forms, and the data directory has 
some 15 subdirectories. 

As once one's gui is fairly stable one dosn't really want to be continually 
re-presented with the gui form at bootup, but with the last code window one 
was working on, I think it would be nice have an option in 
Tools>Preferences>Editor 

 like 'Reload last used class' at bootup.

This would save continually being presented with the gray empty startup panel, 
then having to scroll down through dozens of forms, select the one you want, 
right mouse click on it, go down the menu to edit class and have the code 
window pop up.

Anyway, just a suggestion, I've many others but will list them one by one at a 
later date.

Regards

Richard