Keyboard Friendliness and other UI nitpicks

[marcal]

In evaluating the product I've noticed a few "annoyance factors" and just thought I'd annoy y'all with my observations:

Tabbable tabs: Currently the tabs in the dialog boxes are not reachable in dialog tab order.  This means I have to pick up the mouse (*gasp*!) to choose a tab.

In the attributes and operations dialogs the "OK" button is not reachable from the keyboard, neither by tab or by hotkey (since "o" is already used by "scope").  (Although to be fair, if all changes are "saved," pressing [ESC] has an equivalent effect.)

While the UI mimics the appearance of VS.NET, keyboard mappings are completely different.  Also, while the Toolbox can be reached via Alt+5, there is no way to select via keyboard.

There is no way to select a drawn connector without the mouse.  At minimum, the links listed in the Class dialog should be selectable, with the action opening the appropriate dialog.

In general, it would be nice if the only common action that required the mouse was placing/resizing objects on the digrams.

Also, unless I missed something, there is no way to remap a connector.  If I have an association with detailed roles and such and I want to point to a different class (for example) I have to delete and rebuilt from scratch.

The colors of class attribute and operation icons in the Project View and class context menu (blue and red, respectively) are the opposite of their text coloration in a class diagram.  This is apparently minor, but I find myself constantly selecting the wrong one in the context menu.


If you made it to the bottom of this niggling list, congrats!,
-Marc

[sargasso]

Also, unless I missed something, there is no way to remap a connector.  If I have an association with detailed roles and such and I want to point to a different class (for example) I have to delete and rebuilt from scratch

In the context menus for connectors there is an action to change the source/target for connectors.
hth
Bruce

[johnr]

Hello Marcal,

There is an option in EA to remap the Keyboard as you require by using the Tools | Customize option. From the Customize dialog box select the Keyboard tab and from here you will be able to reassign the shortcut keys.

Hope this helps.

[marcal]

Bruce, thanks for pointing that out.  Next time I'll RTFM.

John, that's nice, but I'm not quite that anal.  Frankly, it would just be easier to learn to navigate the EA out-of-the-box mappings; 'course, if I did that I'd have nothing to complain about.  (I did have to remap Ctl+F4 to close the current diagram.  I mean, come on!)  My point was more just a "if it looks like VS.NET, why doesn't it act like it?" nitpick.

The other issues are still important to me, though, since I'm using EA mainly on a notebook.

[marcal]

Pressing [Delete] does not allow one delete an element in Project View; instead, one must open the context menu for that element, then choose "Delete [elementtype]."

[StefanR]

... or press [Ctrl] + [Del] instead! Unfortunately one cannot select multiple elements in project view and delete them at once This would be a nice feature, too.

Regards,
Stefan.