Details
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Improvement
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Status: Closed
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Major
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Resolution: Feedback Received
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None
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None
Description
I am considering moving my customers to Hop as Kettle updates are nothing more than a splash screen change lately and some long standing bugs just seem to linger there with no solution in sight.
Anyway, I've previewed Hop to several people there (these people spend their whole day on Kettle whereas I'm a coder and don't use it much myself) to get their feedback.
I can appreciate (and I do) the effort going on with cleaning the code and getting rid of the cruft, but they are much more concerned about usability so here it goes
The new way of interacting with the app is clunky and less efficient than before, unless I miss something obvious in which case I apologize.
These are the top 3 things that absolutely drove them nuts:
- say you want to edit a step. A double click on it used to immediately open the edit step window. Now you have to make one click, then move the pointer on the edit icon, then click again
- during a run you want to quickly inspect the data flowing thru steps. Just one click did the trick in kettle, now you have to do the same clicking, wait, move over the preview data icon, click again, wait for the popup to open (and the popup always opens with a ridiculously small size and doesn't remember its last position, and is not dockable)
- enabling/disabling arrows between steps used to require a simple click, now... you get the idea
Kettle UI worked fine in principle. The way it's designed is mostly sound. Its problems lied in the quirks of SWT/GTK and the random bugs, not in its core principles.
Everyone expects the right button to pop up a menu, and the left one to select/inspect stuff. This should not be changed, or you risk alienating those same users you want to attract from the old platform.
Our proposal:
- the huge menu that comes out with single left click should be tied to the RIGHT mouse button (which afaik, in Hop does nothing. why?)
- the left mouse button should, as it was before, select stuff for inspection or perform a sane default action (such as, in the case of hops, enable/disable them)
- data preview while running a pipeline should display rows in the bottom section of the screen in a tab, not in a popup, and should be activated by selection. Maybe, that would be a godsend, fix the ancient issue in Kettle which had the preview table corrupt with more than a few dozen columns in the stream.
If you still want to push this new UI paradigm, which again I strongly suggest is a mistake, please make at least the old behaviour something configurable so that one can choose, and most importantly old users coming from Kettle can feel at home right away.
Thanks
