Re: Front end GUI or Widet? (fwd)

FYI

---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2007 12:28:25 +1200
From: Michael Uddstrom <m.uddstrom_at_niwa.co.nz>
To: Dennis Shea <shea_at_ucar.edu>
Cc: Saji Njarackalazhikam Hameed <saji_at_apcc21.net>,
    Stuart Moore <s.moore_at_niwa.co.nz>
Subject: Re: Front end GUI or Widet?

Dear Dennis (and Saji)

offline too.

We are using NCL both for the generation of lots of standard "outputs", via ncl
scripts... and seeing how powerful it is, we wondered whether anyone had put the
extra GUI wrapper around it - as that might aid interactive analysis and "what
if" questions.

Dennis - I see your point about difficulty and lack of end-user buy-in! And that
is fine.

We (at NIWA) really appreciate all of the good (and active) work going on in the
ncl space - and your level of commitment to responding to user queries. Thanks
very much - we appreciate it.

Saji - thankyou very much for your quick response too... I was asking on behalf
of my colleague Stuart Moore (he wasn't registered on ncl-talk till today!) -
who may contact you directly.

Best regards

Michael

Dennis Shea wrote:
> Hi Saji, Michael
>
> offline
>
> A bit of history .....
>
> When NCL was selected as the "official" processing
> tool for the CCSM [Community Climate System Models],
> the original NCL team was actively developing a GUI.
> Twice they reserved the main seminar room here at NCAR
> to show what they had developed. They also wanted direction
> on what people would want. The first time 2 people showed
> up, the 2nd time 2 or 3. The 'climate people' said that
> GUIs were just not that useful for climate work.
> A number of people said "ncview is good enough for us!"
> Given the list of features/functions people requested for NCL
> and the limited number of people, the GUI was deprecated.
> It is still used internally by one of the original developers.
>
> Also .... even with the limited feed-back, the developers
> found that a general purpose, flexible GUI was going to be very hard to
> develop.
> Personally:
> (1) I agree with the climate people ..... :-)
> If I were a forecast person I may very well have a different
> perspective.
>
> (2) I always push the NCL developers for file IO:
> GRIB-1, GRIB-2, netCDF3, netCDF4, HDF4, HDF4-EOS and HDF5, HDF5-EOS.
>
> Regards
> D
>

-- 
Dr. Michael J. Uddstrom
Science Leader: Environmental Forecasting
Principal Scientist: Meteorology and Remote Sensing
National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research
Private Bag 14-901, Wellington, New Zealand
DDI: +64 4 386 0365, 	Fax: +64 4 386 2153,
Home: +64 4 478 9734
http://www.niwa.co.nz/