APT/ETC Current Defect List

The following comments were offered by Chris O'Dea.

Help menu

• Exposure Calculator help
  • The text is out of date and in many cases the text is not really helpful, ie after reading it I still didn't understand the item in question. Some specifics:
  • We need to remove the references to NGST SEA and replace them with HST APT.
  • The quick edit button is misnamed the summary button. The description of the edit menu actually describes the ETC menu.
  • The top paragraph of the description of the Help menu seems to be describing the Edit menu.
  • The Window menu is not described at all.
  • The directory tree to the left of the text (Table of Contents) does not contain all the menus.
• What's This?
• The context sensitive help is not really useful. No matter what you click on, you get the same help text.
• About the ETC
• need to replace SEA with APT.

ETC Menu

• It seems like we should remove "Turn Synphot Tracing On" from the release version.
• The "copy exposure to baseline" feature looks like it would be useful. I see that the current exposure does get copied to the display which is visible when you click on "Show exposure as Text". However, the baseline exposure does not show up as a black line in the plots as it claims in the help file.
• "Show Exposure as Text" seems to work and the print button also works. We may want to add a "Save As" button also to allow saving it to disk. (As done by the "Save as text" command in the File menu.)
• The information presented in text form is not very exhaustive. We may want to include more details, as is currently done in the output from the CGI ETCs.

Edit Menu

• It is not clear to me what we are supposed to be able to cut, copy, paste, and select.
• This seems to be generic functions which are not relevant to the ETC (in its current form) and should be removed to avoid confusion.

General Preferences

• change SEA to APT in the title.
• HST is the only observatory selectable under "default observatory". Should we turn this off for the first release?
• "Enable apply/reset buttons" is on the general screen. We need this to be local to the ETC.
• "Wavelength unit" currently contains units which are not relevant to HST, but instead to radio astronomy (e.g., cm, m) and allows a silly choice - kilometers. Hertz is allowed, but this is frequency, not wavelength. We may want to change the title of the menu to Wavelength/Frequency and keep Hz. But we should decide if we want to remove the non-HST units such as cm and m or keep it a generic tool - in which case we should add things like eV and keV.
  When I did select Hz as the unit, it replaced angstroms with Hz, but was inconsistent about using scientific notation for the labeling resulting in overwriting some labels so I was not able to read them. I changed the units to microns, and the labeling seemed entirely incorrect. (There seems to be a general problem with the axes for the graphs - OPR 42055).

Exposure Calculator Preferences

• Main ETC chart variables allowed me to select both X and Y axis as time (even though this is not sensible). When I switched the X and Y axes (swapped time and S/N) the scale was not chosen sensibly. When I switched the y axis to show counts, the line was not plotted.
• I set the default range for time to be from 1 to 1000 sec but this seems to be ignored in the plot.

File Menu

• Open.
  • I can't browse my data disks. I can only access my home directory. "Open" only works with binary files.
  • If you try to open a file written by "save as text" it gives incomprehensible error messages.
  • Open and New don't seem to work as expected. They do not update the parameters of the windows (e.g., target, instrument) but merely update the contents of the "Show Exposure as Text" file. The "list" and "details" buttons on the "open" and "save as" menus don't seem to do anything.
• Save.
  • Save doesn't tell you where it is saving the file or what it is calling it.
  • "Save As" seems to work. Though it does let you overwrite another file without asking/complaining about it.
  • "Save As Text" also seems to work. Though again it lets you overwrite files without complaining.
  • "Save As Text" also seems to work. Though again it lets you overwrite files without complaining. The information which is being saved is the same as that displayed in the "show exposure as text" command in the "ETC" menu. Why don't we just include a "save as text" button on the "show exposure as text" display window since we already have a print button there.
  • "Print" and "Print Preview" print the currently displayed plot. They seem to work when printing to a printer.
  • The print files are are large and take a long time to print.
  • However, printing the plots to a postscript file on disk does not work. There is an error message in the log: [ERROR] ExpCalcModule: Unable to print: java.awt.print.PrinterException: java.io.FileNotFoundException: out.ps (Read-only file system)
• The buttons in the file menu refer to different kinds of objects -- which is a bit confusing for a first time user. e.g., "save as" saves the session (I think), "save as text" saves the current exposure parameters to a text file and "print" only prints the plot currently shown in the top window. It doesn't print the text file. (In order to print the text file you need to go to the ETC menu and click on "Show Exposure as Text" and then click on the print button). We should add a word of text to the button labels in the File menu to make it clear what object they are acting on.

Target Menu

• The apply/reset buttons are not activated when you change something.
• The tool tip for the close button says that it will apply changes and close the window, but the changes I am making in the Target window are not being applied, ie the calculation and graph are not being updated.

Instrument Parameters

• The Apply/Reset button does get activated in the Instrument menu. However, I get multiple warnings about the information in the window being overwritten.

Quick Edit Menu

• The apply/reset buttons are not activated when you change something.

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