Improve Windows Multi-monitor Support

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Fri, 02/24/2012 - 04:17 pm

Igor for windows shares a common problem with most other windows applications: it does not handle multiple monitors well, as it constrains all the application windows (graphs, tables, ect) within a single main window frame. This frame likes to occupy one monitor or another, but pretty much refuses to take up the entire space unless manually resized. Also, there's a lot of wasted space from blank menu bars and window flags.

When I'm deeply into a data mining project, getting all the plots/tables/proceedure windows comfortably spread around the main frame is a small task in and of itself.

It has to be coerced to fill the whole screen. Some provision to occupy multiple monitors easily would be nice. Perhaps (although, I doubt the windows API makes this easy) windows could be free floating (like the mac os version) or perhaps there could be a "full screen mode" like firefox that hides the task bar and goes from edge-to-edge.

This could be enhanced by some well thought-out macros that could take a mess of graphs/tables/proceedures and form a dashboard arrangement. (For when you open the .pxp 2 years later...)

While I'm at it: could you make things totally confusing by adding tabs to the main window? That way different subsections of a project could be organized (e.g. if I have a spectroscopy project, I could have one tab for QA/QC of raw data (tables, plots, notebooks), a tab for data processing (those tables/plots/notebooks), and EDA tab, and a tab with all the plots I am submitting to the journal. The tabs could be supported by dragging and dropping windows between tabs, and perhaps by a tab manager (maybe just a beefed up graph manager).
WRT to arranging objects neatly on the monitor space, you might consider my Tidy Screen package ... http://www.igorexchange.com/project/TidyScreen. I like the "dashboard" idea ... where would we all be without our iPad paradigms.

WRT having a tabbed main window to show/hide various things, you might want to check Adam's Window Desktop package ... http://www.igorexchange.com/project/ACL_WindowDesktops

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J. J. Weimer
Chemistry / Chemical & Materials Engineering, UAHuntsville

February 25, 2012 at 07:38 am - Permalink

Does having the task bar span across both monitors fix the issue with Igor not taking up both displays? (Haven't used Windows on a dual screen setup in a while, but this used to work with other programs.)

Switching from an MDI interface to an SDI interface would probably be a lot of work, and not really worth it since they're switching to Qt anyway.

Tabs would be awesome. I'd love to be able to separate my projects into different tabs (e.g. one for structural analysis, one for transport properties, one for chemical composition, one for optical properties...). It's nice having all that data dumped into one project for easy access, but it can also turn into a giant mess very quickly.

March 5, 2012 at 09:31 pm - Permalink

fyzikapan wrote:
Switching from an MDI interface to an SDI interface would probably be a lot of work, and not really worth it since they're switching to Qt anyway.

Don't tell anyone (and don't make any assumptions about what the final product will look like) but right now I can switch between MDI and SDI...

On Windows there's a significant problem in SDI mode of deciding what to do with the menu bar. On Macintosh, there is just one menu bar and it changes depending on the application that's active. On Windows, there isn't any whole-application place to put such a thing. Windows expects that SDI applications will be truly one document per window, all documents of the same type and independent of each other (think documents open in a word processor). But Igor has many interrelated windows all belonging to one development environment. So what to do?
Quote:
Tabs would be awesome. I'd love to be able to separate my projects into different tabs (e.g. one for structural analysis, one for transport properties, one for chemical composition, one for optical properties...). It's nice having all that data dumped into one project for easy access, but it can also turn into a giant mess very quickly.

Being a Macintosh user myself, I don't really have extensive acquaintance with tabs. But I thought that tabs were usually one window or document per tab? In Igor that would work out to a tab for each graph, a tab for each table, etc. It sounds like you have something else in mind.

John Weeks
WaveMetrics, Inc.
support@wavemetrics.com

March 6, 2012 at 11:02 am - Permalink

What I have in mind is that I would be able to click on one 'tab' and have all the graphs/tables/layouts/etc associated with that tab show up. Click another tab, and those graphs/etc go away and I'm shown all the windows associated with that tab. It would even be brought into the existing data browser, so that when I click on a folder (with some sort of flag to differentiate it from regular folders), it brings up all the stuff I have associated with that folder.

I must confess I'm not entirely sure I'd end up using it. I can see it either being totally awesome, or turning experiments into bloated unmanageable messes.

March 6, 2012 at 11:02 pm - Permalink

fyzikapan wrote:
What I have in mind is that I would be able to click on one 'tab' and have all the graphs/tables/layouts/etc associated with that tab show up. Click another tab, and those graphs/etc go away and I'm shown all the windows associated with that tab.


This is almost exactly what my Windows Desktops package (http://www.igorexchange.com/project/ACL_WindowDesktops) does except that it uses a floating window with push buttons instead of tabs. If you click on that link there's an image showing the tool bar.

The tab metaphor is a bit tricky on the Macintosh since Igor doesn't have an outer frame within which all Igor windows reside.

March 7, 2012 at 07:06 am - Permalink