The Unofficial XCSoar Manual

From XCSoar

Improved input system. See Ideas

• The usability of XCSoar will be improved by achieving consistent input actions across all diaogs. A new user then only has to learn the required actions once.

Left/Right and Up/Down

• The action of the UP/DOWN LEFT/RIGHT buttons should be consistent across all dialogs. By doing this the user will automatically learn to always press the correct button to move the cursor around. Most dialogs have the convention that DOWN moves the cursor down, or right. There are however instances where pressing DOWN moves the cursor to the left. These are....

Analysis pages, selection of "<" or ">"

Status pages, selection of "<" ">" or "Close"

System Setup pages, selection of "<" or ">"

• Make all interfaces consistent, i.e. info boxes should be left/right like dialog boxes. This will require some careful thought. e.g. the MacC infobox uses UP/DOWN to change the value and LEFT/RIGHT to select Manual/Auto, a feature which should not be lost.
• Provide a config to swap left/right vs up/down

OR

• Consider optional Enter to edit on each entry (maybe too difficult to implement)

Use of Hard Buttons in Dialogs

• When in a dialog box, always make one of the hardware buttons (e.g. 1) Escape or Close for that box.
• Consider other shortcuts, like Save or OK as the 4th button or similar. Another possibility is that button1 selects the previous page and button4 selects the next page. Pressing LEFT/RIGHT already does this in some dialogs, Status, Analysis, Waypoint details. Again, pick a scheme that makes sense and apply it consistently across all dialogs.
  • Match them up to logical locations on Altair too

Defaults

Some changes to defaults

Open Waypoints

When you open waypoints, if you set a distance (even 1000K) it sorts the waypoints into nearest order. This is a good idea as a default as it is often useful during the day.

Airspace Dialogs

• There are issues with the present Airspace Warning Dialog, especially on a PDA. This problem is acknowledged by JW and should be addressed in a future release.
• The Airspace Query dialog needs to clearly reflect the altitude limits of the airspace in question. At the moment the combination of Flight Levels, feet, and metres makes for difficult interpretation. An airspace volume starting at 5000'Alt and topping out at FL195 needs to be displayed as exactly, and only, that.

Task Edit

• The line for selecting a task file is too short on a PDA in portrait mode. If this had a line all to itself across the whole screen the file name could be read.
• Make XCSoar able to read standard file formats, e.g. DA4 CUP. This would allow selction of tasks planned and saved using SeeYou, LXe etc. Selecting the appropriate file would load the waypoints and tasks in that file.