Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] New Wireshark welcome page!

From: Ulf Lamping <ulf.lamping@xxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 17 Apr 2008 04:45:59 +0200
Maynard, Chris schrieb:
Hi Ulf,
I like it. I always thought the blank gray screen at startup was somewhat plain and boring. We've got all the real estate to do something with, why not put it to good use? Somewhat related to this - I was thinking about proposing a "Wireshark Tips" at startup - the "Did you know?" stuff that many programs have that depict a "Tip of the day" for instance. A lot of new features keep getting added to Wireshark and I'm not sure everyone is always aware of them, so that might be one way to help introduce these features. It's easy to assume that everyone will actually go back and re-read the user documentation to find out what's new each time, but I'm not sure that actually happens. One thing I find about these tips though is that many times they get turned off because it's annoying to have to hit a close button each time upon startup for the tip dialog; however, if there's a section on this new startup page of yours reserved for a "Tip of the day" and perhaps with a "Next Tip" button to cycle through the tips, then the user wouldn't have to close an extra dialog. That to me would seem like it would be useful.
The kind of "Did you know that if you click on ..." is the first thing I switch off when I first start a program - so I don't tend to implement it :-)

However, a basic news panel *might* be useful. Problem here: for example you won't get freshly developed features if you are using the WS release versions. I currently don't see a good way to handle these problems, but this might be a future thing to think about.

BTW: There are also lot's of people that pretty much dislike those "chatty" programs at all.
OK, other than that, here is some initial feedback: 1) The "Open Recent" middle portion seems to right-justify the files and cut off the beginning of the path. It looks strange to me, although left-justification would probably show the path and cut off the filename itself, which would probably be less useful. Perhaps word-wrapping the filename would work well here?
As I said, basic implementation :-) BTW: left-justify doesn't really work as the last part of the name is usually significant. Has to be improved - should be easy to do.
2) Clicking on the "Capture Options" results in a Wireshark crash. (At least on Windows XP). I can send a dump if needed, but it happens every time so I would suspect you would be able to easily reproduce it.
Hmmm, it just works fine on my XP machine! And to be honest, looking at the code I don't see a good reason for it to fail.
3) Security: Text should read, "Work with Wireshark as *securely* as possible"
I'll fix that
4) Show some "tooltips" when highlighting one of the choices. For example, when the cursor is hovering on the "Security" link, the tooltip could show the http://wiki.wireshark.org/Security URL that you will go to if you click on it.
Unsure if this is really helpful, as there's already the "subtitle". Will think about it.
5) Moving various other windows across the page seems to corrupt it. See sample screen capture, attached.
GTK bug for years, not a lot we can do about it :-(
6) Add a development section? Getting started, README.developer, SVN link, mailing lists, bugzilla, buildbot, reporting bugs, links to IETF (for RFC's), IANA, etc.???
I don't think this is the place for a devel section. Any gifted developer will have a look at the webpage ;-)
7) Since Wireshark is hosted by CACE, maybe they'd like to plug their site? WiresharkU?
I strongly oppose *any* advertisements on the Wireshark user interface, be it for CACE, WiresharkU or anything else. The day I see advertisements on the Wireshark GUI, I will stop immediately to work on it any further - or maybe I would start a project fork!!! We are talking about an open source program here - I really, really don't like to see it to become adware!

Regards, ULFL