Manage My Desktop

The “desktop manager” functionality in IC-Inspection and on the INSPECTION screen of NEXUS IC works in the same way. It allows you to freely set up your screen based on your requirements, view or hide panes, drag and drop them and save your layout as a desktop.

View/Hide Panes

You can make panes visible or invisible on the screen by selecting or deselecting the relevant option from under the View toolbar button on the screen. You can also hide a pane by closing the pane with the icon at their top right corner.

Drag and Dock Panes

You can drag panes around the screen and dock them wherever you want to see them.

When you are dragging a pane over an existing pane, you will see a pale blue highlight and/or a set of icons:

If you drag the pane over one of the icons, the pale blue highlight shows where the pane will drop, and the new size and shape it will take on. If you drop the pane onto one of the icons, the pane will dock appropriately: dropping it onto the centre square icon will make this pane part of the tab group; dropping it on the left, right, top or bottom icons will split the current pane and drop this pane to the left, right, top or bottom of it.

If you drop a pane outside the main pane, they will become “floating” panes.

Areas with no panes present are considered a ‘void’. If you drop a pane into the centre of that void, the dropped pane fills the void, and subsequent drops can split that pane into parts. If you drop a pane into the left, right, top or bottom of the void, then the void is split, but the right, left, bottom or top will still contain the void.

Pin/Unpin Panes

You can click on Unpin to “unpin” panels so that they collapse to an edge of the pane. To recover an unpinned pane, click on the pane’s name at the edge of the pane, then click on the Pin icon.

Resize Panes

You can resize panes with the “splitter” at each edge between two docked windows. When you move the mouse over a splitter the mouse cursor will change to a LRSplit or UDSplit split arrow. Drag the splitter to resize the windows.

The difference between floating and docked windows is that docked windows will resize together. When you drag a splitter, one window will get bigger while another gets smaller. Thus, docked windows never overlap each other. Typically most or all of your windows will be docked.

Create/Save/Delete Desktop Layout

You may need different desktop layouts for different purposes. For example, if you’re performing a structural type inspection, you may need to see multimedia images, however, if you’re reviewing corrosion growth rates and thickness readings, you may not be interested in multimedia but you want to see the charts to view the trend lines and so on. You can set up different desktop layouts and switch between using the toolbar buttons on the top of the screen:

To switch between desktops, select the required desktop from the drop-down list available under the Desktop toolbar button.

To save the changes that you’ve made to the current desktop, click the toolbar button for Save the active desktop. Settings are not automatically saved when you close the program.

To create a new desktop, arrange the desktop as required and click the toolbar button for Add a new desktop with the current layout to save the current arrangement of panes. You can name the desktop as required.

To delete an existing desktop layout, click the toolbar button for Delete the currently active desktop.

To restore the desktop to the default layout pre-delivered with the system, click the toolbar button for Restore the default desktops. This option is available only in IC-Inspection.

Tip

If you have two monitors, it may be useful to spread across both, either by clicking the “Restore Down” button at the top right of the pane if necessary and then dragging the main application window larger, or by floating panes such as Drawings and then dragging the floating panes onto the second monitor.

In IC-Inspection, the following three desktop layouts are pre-delivered:

Setup Desktop: Layout optimised for setting up IC-Inspection, including visible panes such us Devices or Survey Values.

Pipelines Desktop: Layout optimised for the inspection of pipelines.

Structures Desktop: Layout optimised for the inspection of structures.