When I started a presentation on “what’s new in Petrosys” at an established site recently, a regular user made a comment that we frequently hear from the experienced mapping gurus at our long term client sites – “I hope it hasn’t changed!”.
As computers get faster and people become more impatient, interface technologies necessarily change. Whilst we still speak of dialing phone numbers, many of us have now progressed past the intermediate stage of punching increasingly complex numbers into tinier keyboards and rely on clicking on contact list entries to make our phone calls. Microsoft Office has been through several generations and, whilst it has annoyed the scribes amongst us by chewing up valuable screen height with the fat ribbon, it appears to make it easier for casual users to change fonts. Typing on the virtual screen of an iPad might seem a tedious way of answering emails, but the glass screen survives the odd coffee spill a lot better than a high end laptop keyboard!
And so Petrosys, also, introduces significant changes to its user interface with version 17. Having been involved in a panic stricken update to the online help over the past few weeks, I am pleased to say that there are only a few things that mapping gurus might find mildly annoying, which I’m going to outline here.
To start with, the closest thing that Petrosys has to the MS ribbon – our display list – is not locked into using up a fixed part of a computer screen designed more for watching wide screen movies than doing real work. It starts off on the left edge of the screen, and you can drag it away to park it at the top, let it live by itself somewhere else on your desktop, or hide it completely. The concept of ‘Display/Modify’ has disappeared, we now assume that you’ll want to see the list of layers most of the time so we’ve changed the concept to either showing the layer list – the default – or hiding it. If you are one of those people whose display lists have become really long then you should experiment with the new layer grouping, which allows both automatic grouping such as by data type or coordinate reference system, and manual grouping for example to create separate layer groups for individual sands or horizons within a composite map. Some experienced users will miss having the layer control icons immediately on top of the layer window – it’s one of the toolbars in the default toolbar parking lot – but note that it magically appears in the layer window if you drag that to an independent location (or ‘undock it’ in programmer-speak).
There are lots of icons now, and even more that we didn’t have room for on the various toolbars. Please don’t ask us for an upgrade to the icon style for another year or two, we spent a lot of time negotiating this look! You can change the options for which icons appear on the toolbars and add short text descriptions to the icons using the View/Toolbars option, and you can drag icons for your most popular options to your very own personal toolbar.
In terms of driving the screen in general, you might find yourself intuitively discovering some of our changes such as using the mouse wheel to scroll and pan the map display, as these are behaviours that we’ve come to expect from other maps such as Google. Another feature taken from the web experience is that you can use ctrl+ and ctrl- to change the font size in many of the control panels, which is great if you need to explain something to someone looking over your shoulder.
The most dramatic change in Petrosys is right at the start of the application, when you launch Petrosys you are now automatically in the cool new application launcher, with project selection an option within that. If you think that the Petrosys logo in this looks too green, then zoom in to the best structure on your key map and use the View/Copy-As-Project-Thumbnail option to personalize it. There’s one thumbnail for each project so you can use this to add a rapid visualisation for project selection, and impress your boss with the rapid preview of your portfolio of great maps. Whilst we are on to project selection and the launcher, the File/File-Manager option launches your operating systems file manager in the project directory, making it easy to get at recent input and output data.
File selection in general has changed, with a largely undecorated file path field allowing you to just type over a file name if you are just making small changes, and having to click on the somewhat minimalist ‘folder’ icon at the left edge to bring up the file picker itself. Having gotten there, however, you’ll be pleased to see that it lets you rename and delete files during the file selection process, so that you can tidy up your project as you go.
Speaking of selecting things in general, one menu option I’m having trouble adjusting to is that you now have to ‘Open’ a map sheet instead of ‘Selecting’ it. Another option that got a name change to make it easier for new users to discover is Display/GIS, which was formerly Display/Spatial. Then again, maybe you are one of those Petrosys classic users who never knew how easy it was to display shape files using this hidden gem?
In terms of menu shifts, we have pulled the plug of putting hard copy options under the ‘View’ menu, if you have been using View/Plot you’ll now find that functionality under ‘File/Print’ where it is represented by the ‘Petrosys graphics drivers’ option.
The majority of options that formerly cluttered our grey ‘chocolate box’ front menu have now been migrated to various menus that cascade from the top of the application launcher. Some of the more specialist options have found a home in one of the main applications (‘apps’ in iPerson speak) for example if you are a function list user that is now in the ‘Seismic (SDF)’ application which is the option formerly known as the Seismic Project Manager.
I trust that after a few hours with V17 you will start looking at the old V16 menus with as little nostalgia as most of us here at Petrosys do. A great thing about contributing to this batch of documentation upgrades is that a lot of the editing has been to remove things which are no longer required, like the differentiation between ‘database enabled and disabled’ versions of the mapping menus. This reflects the more logical architecture of our new user interface.
Footnote: Tip from the scribe – if you are still frustrated by the fat ribbon in MS-Office 2010, double clicking on the associated top menu tab will hide and redisplay it!