New Virtual-GPS features suggestion

Question

I like the new interface that has a more GSAK look.

But there are some improvement i can think of 

The first on is to be able to select which datafield to display and reorder them. 
It is not possible now to see the for example cache name and any FP field at the same time and a can always see field i might have no particulate interest in most of the time like Latutitude elevation etc.  And be able to change the order to directly see what i am interested in and with a side scroll thing i might what to checkout.

I cant find any filed that says if the cache has corrected coordinates, The type field would be nicer if it was i icon winch i obvious possible looking at the found slimy.

The size of the interface is another problem. The box is the same size as everything else on PGC but other pages have no side scrolling. The interface should be the with of the windows. You can scale it in the bottom right corner but only to the right and you have to extend it off the screen and scroll the webpage to the right to get a full windows. It would be much nicer if the interface was the width of the window.

The search is mention in other post not intuitive. There is some field/types specific search option because ex cachename and difficult does not have the same alternative. Disables and all other boolean field should only have the option is true and is false.

There should be some obvious indicator on the screen if the filter is used perhaps the text filtered in the bottom line.
It would be nice if the filters was persistent and survive a page reload.

A new export function i would like is export to PDF or something like it to make an easy printable version of the virtual GPS. I often print the page or a reformatted CVS export to have a paper list of the caches i like to take on a trip because it is easier to look at in the fields then on a phone etc. With the extended number of datafields ans x and y scrolling printing from the web browser wont work very well

Answer 1

Reordering columns and hiding/showing them was on the todo-list (and still is). However, the feature that is ready for that, was incompatible with other features we are using, which made it very complicated. We will have to write quite a lot of tricky code for this, which can be done. But we decided to release the new VGPS version now when it had everything that the old system had. Then improvements will come with time. Sharing lists is half way there for example.

Corrected coordinates is on the TODO-list. Again, the old system didn't have it, so we released without it, since it didn't make anything worse.

We will consider using icons for type and/or size. While it makes the interface slicker in one way, it will make the search/filter trickier. It is not likely that we will spend time on making the filtering use icons, and then people will need to know what to write to find a mystery cache (which would be 'Unknown Cache'). Filtering with icons may be possible, but most likely a lot of work.

 

We are currently testing a more fluid interface. Some issues has been found that we will look into if we can solve. Hopefully a release within a week, lots of feedback on the VGPS2-system. Related topic: http://project-gc.com/qa/?qa=2930/mid-sized-new-virtual-gps-list-table-possible

I do not understand the exact issue with the filtering regarding cache name and difficulty. One is a string and one is a float. It's natural that the compares aren't the same? For the boolean fields we will implement a better solution. Haven't tested it yet, but I think we can manage a select box (yes/no).

I don't think we can have the filters themselves visible since one can build quite complex filters. But some form of indicator sounds reasonable. We will try to fix something.

Creating PDFs could be interesting, something we have thought about. But every user will want different layouts. I do have some thoughts, and if you are interested, we could design layout number 1 together. Our receipt on payments are pretty much written in HTML that then gets rendered as a PDF. I would like something similar, and if you are interested in designing a layout, I can give you some pointers to what we have used as technology. Then you can probably do the template yourself (and get exactly what you want).

PS! I got a lot of new notes on the TODO-list from this.

PPS! I do realize these are suggestions and that you do understand that we might have some of it under development.

Comments

>I do not understand the exact issue with the filtering regarding cache name and difficulty. One is a string and one is a float.
Was just an example that different field already has different filter options and that could be extended to Boolean types for the other fields. There exist is null and is not null option that code probably can be copied to a i 0 and is 1  and renamed to True and False. The text input box is disabled for those options.

There was no suggestion to show what filter was used but only an indicator that one was used.

On cache types problem is reasonable. But I cant see any filter possibilities today to do more then exclude/include a single type (if there are non non obvious or statement in the contain field). But there are to many types to have an exclude include for everyone.

An easy PDF export is to just render it like the tables are today but the problem is probably that the data is longer than the paper even if printed in landscape.

I will also have a look at how jQuery UI  because it is easier to give sugestion when one know the limitations

I would be interested in trying to do something with PDF export