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Bernese GPS Software Version 5.0 - Bernese GNSS Software

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18. The Menu System<br />

18.1 Introduction<br />

The <strong>Bernese</strong> <strong>GPS</strong> <strong>Software</strong> is a very complex tool consisting of dozens of closely cooperating<br />

programs. It became clear already during the development of early versions of the software<br />

that there is a great desire for a supporting menu program. Such a tool should allow to use<br />

the <strong>Bernese</strong> <strong>GPS</strong> <strong>Software</strong> effectively helping the user to run the separate programs and to<br />

specify reasonable options for them. However, the available programming tools were quite<br />

restricted at that time and the only possible solution was a kind of a line-oriented menu<br />

system, based (in principle) on the vt100 terminal command set. The old line-oriented menu<br />

system had been used successfully for many years up to <strong>Version</strong> 4.2 .<br />

However, during the preparation of the <strong>Version</strong> 4.2 a number of difficulties became evident<br />

which were due to the old menu system. The main problems were the following:<br />

• The lack of ANSI cursor control support under some operating systems resulted in<br />

restrictions of the use of the software on those platforms.<br />

• Differences in cursor libraries on different platforms led to platform-dependent and<br />

even compiler-dependent pieces of source code.<br />

• The maintenance of the old menu system became increasingly difficult due to its<br />

complicated structure.<br />

• The line-oriented menu system did not fulfill the requirements of today’s users that<br />

are familiar with modern graphical interfaces.<br />

Taking into account the importance of the user interface it was decided to develop a completely<br />

new software tool that should solve the problems listed above. The menu program of<br />

the <strong>Bernese</strong> <strong>GPS</strong> <strong>Software</strong> <strong>Version</strong> <strong>5.0</strong> is the result of this development. It is a user friendly<br />

graphical interface with the well-known elements of modern windows programs.<br />

The menu system is written in C++ and is based on the QT library from Trolltech (see Section<br />

18.9.1 for details). While the old menu system consisted of one Fortran menu program<br />

for each processing program, the new menu is one single and generic user interface program.<br />

It allows to specify sessions and campaigns, to view and edit data files, execute processing<br />

programs, start processing through the <strong>Bernese</strong> Processing Engine (BPE), in short words,<br />

to control all functions available in the <strong>Bernese</strong> <strong>GPS</strong> <strong>Software</strong> package.<br />

This chapter gives a general overview on the menu system, introduces its features, and<br />

provides technical details on the mechanisms it is based on.<br />

<strong>Bernese</strong> <strong>GPS</strong> <strong>Software</strong> <strong>Version</strong> <strong>5.0</strong> Page 355

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