Re: [Gretl-devel] Signalling
On Mon, 7 Jan 2013, Andreas Noack Jensen wrote:
Even though I can always find what I am looking for (which is a
problem in OxMetrics) I find the GUI a little unintuitive.
Unfortunately a cannot really say what to change in order make it
more intuitive to me. Only, that I don't like the category
"Nonlinear models" as I think the categories should be positively
defined (like the story about the two animals of the world:
Elephants and non-elephants).
That's a fair point, and easy enough to fix, or at least improve.
Having a "Limited dependent variable" category in the model menu
might help?
A more real problem is GTK maybe. It just doesn't look good in
general and in particular not on Windows and Mac. Again, I have no
idea about how to change that as I guess it would take too much
work without any functionality gains.
Using a toolkit other than GTK for the GUI would be a huge amount of
work and not something I personally would undertake. But GTK 3 has a
more "modern" look, and as it matures we can consider switching for
the Windows and Mac packages. As I've mentioned before, using the
Quartz-based variant of GTK would (in principle) make gretl much
more Mac-like.
I have thought about what I think the obstacles for Gretl are in
getting
more attention. The statistical functionalities in Gretl are really great.
Within my own area I think that the cointegration stuff is really great and
better than most of the commercial packages (but the unrestricted models
should still go :-)). At my department we teach SAS but faculty uses Stata
and I don't think it will change anytime soon. Maybe people like the idea
about a supporting institution (enterprise) for the software to ensure
continuity which is again a problem that is hard to deal with.
True, we can't do the "enterprise" thing. But we could perhaps think
about a more formal release process, with more systematic and
widespread pre-testing -- and more "advertising", if we can think of
a way of doing that. Maybe do one "LTS" release per year, in which
case we could maybe reinstate automated updates for such releases.
Not sure how much this would help, but one thing I've noticed with
colleagues who use gretl in their teaching is that they and their
students tend to be using rather dated versions of gretl at most
points in time.
Allin