Hi Yuriy,
Is it possible to make UI compliant to general standards and rules of the specific OS?
I understand you. Before continuing, I inform you that a future version of PixInsight (1.7 probably) will include a fully configurable key mappings system. In this way each user will be able to customize his/her keyboard preferences. This will probably be released along with the new GUI skins system.
Having said that, please take into account that PixInsight is not a Windows application; it is a
multiplatform application. Currently this includes Linux/X11 (which is an extremely rich ecosystem with many graphical desktop environments, all of them different), Mac OS X, and Windows. During this year and 2010, we'll probably have new ports to Sun Solaris and HP UX. There is also a project to port PixInsight to supercomputer clusters.
As a multiplatform project, PixInsight does not necessarily obey certain rules that are sound on particular platforms. For example, many Mac OS X users have criticized PixInsight for some nonstandard aspects of its user interface. One of the facts they find particularly odd is that PixInsight has been designed to occupy the entire screen, which is quite unusual on the Mac. Many Windows users are surprised when they discover that PixInsight doesn't use the Windows registry at all (a couple years ago we replaced it by a multiplatform settings system which is much more stable, fast and simple). PixInsight's workspace is actually a desktop environment with iconic metaphors to objects; this is also unusual on all platforms.
As a software developer, I don't follow customary design rules on any platform if I think they are wrong, or if the same thing can be done better in other ways. I must recognize that I love to break rules for those reasons (and quite a bunch of other reasons, actually
). An example is the typical list of open documents under the Window main menu item. In my opinion, this is inefficient, especially when one has a lot of images (not all platforms support scrollable menus, for example). PixInsight implements much better GUI resources to manage images (the View Explorer window and the View Selector list).
Regarding keyboard accelerators, one of the design rules for PixInsight Core's GUI is that the same accelerators, as long as possible, are used on all platforms. Mac OS X necessarily breaks this rule in several occasions, due to its substantially different keyboard layout (with respect to customary PC keyboards), but I have tried hard to apply it (the main changes are that function keys, besides F5 and F6, are not used on Mac OS X, and that most Ctrl key combinations have been replaced by Cmd combinations).
Ctrl+PgDown - Tab control, move forward through tabs (same as CTRL+TAB) or document, see Excel sheets navigation as example.
Ctrl+End - Edit box shortcut key, Move cursor to the end of the document.
The
Window > Next Image Window and
Window > Send Active Image Window to Back commands in PixInsight are not equivalent to (they don't do the same things as) the typical
cycle throughout documents function that is customary in Windows applications. This is a good reason to use different keyboard accelerators, in my opinion.
The
Window > Next Image Window (Ctrl+PgDown) command is intended as a quick way to swap between the two topmost images. For me at least, this is a very convenient function. For example, it is really useful to swap between an image and its mask.
The
Window > Send Active Image Window to Back (Ctrl+End), as its name says, is not intended to cycle through images (although it certainly can be used to this purpose, as a side effect), but to modify the z-order (the stacking order) of image windows by sending the active window to the workspace's surface.
I selected the Ctrl+PgDown and Ctrl+End keyboard combinations for these commands because I think they are very mnemonic for the tasks performed.
Nevertheless, as I've said above, keyboard accelerators will be user-definable in PixInsight, which I hope will solve all of these issues. Or, if you want to cure your present Windows addiction, do what I do: use regularly three platforms and seven operating systems. Then you'll become truly platform-independent, believe me
