Guy Harris wrote:
Ulf Lamping wrote:
No, please don't. The reason you've got such a rude criticism from me
is simple. The current usability of the various statistics dialogs is
really a bad thing. Take three various dialogs from the Statistics
menu and you'll get three different ways to do things, and that's
very bad IMHO. I think it's because people think about their problems
and don't try to provide a "common look and feel".
...and perhaps because there's no common *code* to put up statistics
dialogs, although now there probably is - the stats tree code.
Yes, having no common code is one main reason for the mess we have
today. There are others as well, e.g. the "pre-dialog" to optionally
enter a filter expression is just a "usability nightmare".
The stats tree code will hopefully work for many types of statistics.
There may be other information where this might not be the best way to
display things. However, if there are *reasons* to do something
different than before it's ok, just to do something different than
before "without real reasons" is not ...
BTW: the stats tree code seems to lack of important features like "Save"
or "Copy" (I'd prefer Copy) and alike ...
Even this code still uses the "pre-filter" dialog, which is just a
usability nightmare IMHO and nothing else. If a filtering option is
presented to the user (which IMO is a good idea), it should be included
into the display dialog (maybe through an "Advanced" button or such),
but not forcing the user to "click through it". Most of the time the
"simple" user won't use filtering for this (like me) and the newbie
wants to see what this stat is all about. Having the filter dialog open
after closing the stats dialog doesn't make things even better ...
If that common code lets most of the statistics-gathering be shared
between Tethereal and Ethereal, with only the lower-level display code
being different (but with that code being shared by all the statistics
in Tethereal or by all the statistics in Ethereal), so much the better
That's of course a good way ...
(and if it means that the Ethereal code could also draw graphs at some
point, with the individual statistics not having to know how to do
that, that's even better).
I've doubts if that's possible, but having most of the stats share the
same code is, of course, a *really* good idea :-)
Regards, ULFL
