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Graphical User Interface



Description

The standard graphical user interface provided by the Viewerdisplaypanel tool is shown in Figure 1.5. Surrounding the actual display area itself are five GUI components: the menu bar at the top, the button bar at the bottom, the tracking bar[s] just above the buttons, the controlbox on the left, and the (currently disabled) ``tapedeck'' control on the right. Applications programmers are able to control which of these components appear on the Viewerdisplaypanel tools that they create, and hence throughout AIPS++, Viewerdisplaypanel tools can appear slightly different from the example given here.

Figure 1.5: The Viewerdisplaypanel tool graphical user interface
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Note: All AIPS++ GUIs have a so-called popup help. Just rest your mouse cursor on top of a GUI element (e.g. a button) and a little frame will appear outlining the funtionality of this element. If you then press and hold down the right mouse button you will get a detailed description. The information given there should be sufficient to let you operate that GUI element.


The menu bar

In , a typical Viewerdisplaypanel tool is shown in all its glory. The menu bar along the top has just three menus:


The button bar

Along the bottom of the Viewerdisplaypanel tool are a few buttons, which are available for commonly executed tasks:


The tracking bar[s]

Separate tracking bars are generated for each Viewerdisplaydata tool registered on the Viewerdisplaypanel tool. They continually report the value and position of the point of the display area under the mouse cursor.

Pressing space bar in the display area will "freeze" the tracking displays or restore them again to continual tracking. Pressing the L key will send the displayed values to the logger. (An even more detailed record may also be sent to the clipboard, by using the Positions rollup under the Tools/ImageAnalysis menu item).

Note that if you have "click-to-focus" set in your windowing system, you may need to click on the displaypanel's window before it will recognize the key presses above. This can be confusing, since the tracking bar[s] will respond to mouse movement in any case.


The control box

The control box (on the left hand side of most Viewerdisplaypanel tools) provides a more convenient way to access the various controls available on Viewerdisplaypanel tools. Clicking on a button will assign that control to the mouse button which was used to click, over-riding any previous assignment to that mouse button.

For most tools the following actions apply:

From the top button downwards, the controls are:


The animation tapedeck

In its 'Normal' mode, the tapedeck-style controls down the right-hand side of most Display Panels provide basic movement between image planes, along a selected third dimension of the displaydatas. This set of buttons will only be enabled when the first-registered displaydata reports that it has more than one plane along the 'Z axis' specified in its 'Adjust' panel. In the most common case the animator controls the frequency channel being viewed. From the top down, the tape deck controls allow the user to:

Below the tapedack buttons is an editable text box indicating the current frame number and a sunken label showing the total number of frames. One can type a channel number into the current frame box to jump to that channel, for example, when 'Frequency' is on the 'Z axis'.

Below these is a right-arrow button; pressing it will display a popup frame containing sliders for setting the animation speed and the number of frames to skip when playing animations.

Below all these controls is a pair of radio buttons selecting animator mode: either 'Normal' (the default mode described above) or 'Blink'. In 'Blink' mode, when more than one raster image is registered on the Display Panel, the tapedeck will control which one is being displayed at the moment. The images registered should cover the same portion of the sky, using the same coordinate projection. Several images can also be displayed side-by-side in this mode, with the same zoom applied to all. For details on operating the Display Panel in this mode, see the Display section of the AIPS++ Cookbook, vol. 1.


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2006-10-15