Expert mode in JOSM

[stoecker]

JOSM gets more and more options. While this allows to use it much better, it is also confusion for beginners. Stripping the functionality for beginners would mean to reduce usefulness for experts, so this is not a good way to go.

The German DSL routers Fritz.Box have a pretty good method to deal with this issue. They use a global "expert" setting. When it is disabled a lot of complicated options vanish from the user interface. If enabled everything is show.

I think the same will work for JOSM. When "expert" mode is disabled we could hide a lot of preferences settings and maybe also a few functions (mainly visible ones, not the hidden things). The result would be a cleaner user interface for beginners and and easy way to switch into expert mode.

The "expert" mode should be true for existing installations and should be set false for new installations (we can test this with loaded version number in preferences file).

@bastiK, xeen: Does mail-copy work this time?

[xeen]

I thought about this recently, too, and believe it's a good idea (unless someone drops *the* idea to cram JOSMs functionality into a perfectly intuitive interface). Unfortunately our resources are too limited for supervised tasks given to novices, a/b testing and similar. I feel uncomfortable guessing which features are advanced and which are not and while there may be specific ones we agree on, I fear there will be many where we just don't know.

Is there a way to do build profiling into a java app without having to actually change the code itself? This would be a quick and easy way to generate statistics what methods get called most often which can be traced back to certain features. Having to hook into each and every function will probably be a lot of effort, although MapMode+ToggleDiags+JosmActions would already cover a lot of ground.

For starters I suggest clearing out the preferences because the infrastructure is already there (firefox like about:config tab for advanced features) and data can easily be gathered by Help → Status Report (or implement a more fancy method to the start up notes that only requires the user to click a link to submit his/her settings). Long story short, we can make statistics which options remain on their default anyway and pull them from the "common" prefs.

Also, mail copy did work.

[stoecker]

ATM I mainly would focus on preferences and e.g. the Search dialog (which gets crowded). Regarding real functionality I would be very careful, but some work modes (e.g. delete mode) and some toggle dialogs (e.g. display style, changeset handling) probably can be hidden for novices.

[stoecker]

Needs more fine tuning, but generally: Fixed.