Section: 4.1.0 Basic Preferences

4.1.0 Basic Preferences

In this section we will briefly cover how to change user preferences.

Select the Edit→Preferences menu item to bring up the User Preferences window. This window consists of seven tabs.
Select the General tab.

The Show Dashboard on Start and Show Help Tip Dialog checkboxes allow you to control what windows are shown automatically.
The When Opening a Bundle section allows you to control the behavior of the IDV when a bundle is opened.
Show Windows When They Are Created controls if the display windows are shown or not when they are not docked in the Dashboard.
As we will discuss later, the Resource Sitepath is one way to specify where to look for application resources. The command line argument:
-sitepath
is saved as a user preference.

Go to the Formats and Data tab.
- Try changing the Date Format and click Apply. Notice that the format of the times in the Time Animation Widget and Display List changes to the new format.
- Change Latitude/Longitude format to a higher precision, e.g. "##0.00000" and click Apply. Move the cursor around in the view window and notice the precision of the values in the Cursor Readout.
- The Probe Format is an html template for displaying data probe results. Try mousing over the text field to show a tooltip that describes the format.
- The Distance Unit is used for controls and readouts that use distances.
- Sampling Mode is used in the displays to determine how grids are sampled.
- Tune performance and memory use with the Caching, Max Image Size and Grid Cache Threshold.
Select the View tab. These are preferences used in the map display to determine clipping, wireframe display, background color, etc.

Select the Navigation tab. This allows you to define different mouse and key bindings.
Select the Toolbar tab. This allows you top define what toolbar icons are shown on the toolbar.
Select the System tab. These are preferences used to change the system settings such as the amount of memory allocated to the IDV, data caching, threading and some Java 3D settings. In order for these changes to take effect, the user will have to restart the IDV.

Memory You can set the amount of memory allocated to the IDV as a percentage of the total system memory or a specific amount (in megabytes). On 32-bit systems, the maximum is 1.5 gigabytes (1500 MB).
Thread Count Taking advantage of mulitple core chip architectures, the user can set both the thread count for rendering and for data reading. For rendering, each time step for each display is rendered separately, and 2 threads is optimal due to memory issues.
Set the Java 3D/Enable geometry by reference If you have problems with spurious map lines, turn this off.