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Videos (SeaDAS Tutorial Series: Toolbars)
Do you have any tools in SeaDAS which you frequently use, but you keep having to navigate through menu dropdowns to get at them, or you simply keep forgetting where the tools you need are located. In this video, I'm going to show you how to use SeaDAS Toolbars and fully customize them to help you put the tools you need right where you need them, conveniently accessible at the top of your application.
Hey this is Danny, one of the designers of SeaDAS here are at NASA, Ocean Ecology Lab, where we give you science quality data of our planet and give you the tools you need to process and analyze the data right on your own personal laptops and computers.
So SeaDAS tools has many tools and they can be accessed in several ways, either through the menu system, through a text-search query, or through toolbars. Toolbars are essentially groupings clickable icon shortcuts to the individual tools. The toolbars which you see here (displayed by default) are merely what the designers of SeaDAS have selected as the most commonly used tools for a general SeaDAS user. But there's plenty of tools NOT displayed by default and every user IS unique. Maybe the tools which you often use are NOT shown here, or perhaps some of these default tools are tools you don't use and are just clutter for you taking up your working space. Let's dive in and see how the SeaDAS toolbars function and if you stick around to the end of the video I'm going to show you how you can create your own customize toolbars.
Each tool has an icon indicating the tool, and if you hover over the icon you can see the tooltips telling you which tool it is.
If we take a closer look, we notice little vertical dotted lines. These are divider lines which separate out the individual toolbar groupings. If we click and hold on the line, we can drag the toolbar to a new location, we can even drag it sideways or even downwards to start a new toolbar row.
Before we go too much farther, I will point out that SeaDAS WILL remember your latest toolbar arrangement and if you close and reopen SeaDAS it will retain your most recent toolbar arrangement. You can reset the toolbars back to their factory specs as I will show you later in this video.
As I mentioned there are many toolbars NOT shown by default. To get at these we can go to the Menu > View > Toolbars and we see a rather large listing of toolbars which we can toggle ON/OFF. However a quicker access, more convenient access to this menu listing is to just right-click in the toolbar zone and we get this same Toolbar menu. So let's turn on a couple and turn off a couple of toolbars and move them around a little bit.
You could turn on all the toolbars, just for a look see, but this is a lot.
Conversely, you could turn off ALL the toolbars and completely clear up this area to make it usable real estate. This is kinda nice, but then you would need to access your tools through the Menu or text-search feature, so I personally prefer having the toolbars.
Now that we've blown away the toolbars, let's go ahead and restore them to their original factory setup. To do this, just right-click in the toolbar zone, and select "Reset Toolbars" and we are back.
Okay you might ask yourself "Well why are some of my toolbar tool icons greyed out?" This simply means that we haven't selected or activated a particular object, be it a file, a band, a View Window, or some other condition which the tool utilizes and requires.
Let me illustrate how this works. I have 2 files loaded with no image view window open. Let me deselect the file and now I have nothing selected. Almost everything is greyed out. We do see a few tools available. These particular tools are stand-alone and don't rely on anything being currently loaded into SeaDAS.
Now let's select a file (by clicking on it). We see more toolbar icons have become enabled. These tools operate on a file loaded into SeaDAS. By selecting the file, I tell SeaDAS which file the tool will be operating on.
Let's double click the file and unwind it's directory and select the chlor_a band. Notice that the "Filter Band" tool just became active. This tool operates on a selected band applying a filter to that input band.
Now let's double-click the "chlor_a" band to open a View Window. NOW we see almost all the toolbar icons have become enabled. The ones which just became enabled are tools which act on a View Window. If I have multiple View Windows open then whichever View Window that I have currently selected is the one that the tool will be acting on.
There ARE a few lingering disabled tools, but each of these tools will become enabled if the context and scenario is right.
Okay now comes the kicker, the icing on top. You can customize these toolbars and even make your OWN personal custom toolbar. Let's see how. Right-click here and select "Customize". Okay well we are in the right place. What you see in this window is a listing of all the tools available to the toolbars which have associated icons. They may be organized here in a slightly different structure than your actual toolbars or even than your menu system, but regardless they are all here.
While this tool is open, I am capable of moving icons around within a toolbar or even moving them to another toolbar. Let's move the Statistics tool to the front of the Analysis Toolbar. Now let's throw all our Geometry drawing tools into the main Geometry Toolbar. You'll notice that this leaves behind some empty toolbars, but when I close this tool those toolbars actually go away.
I can completely remove a tool from the toolbar by dragging it into the "Customize" window. It goes to some preassigned location in the window. It's here. So I removed all the Geometry drawing tools. Vice-versa I can drag a tool out to a toolbar, let's drag them back. A bonus is that I can even place the same tool in multiple toolbars.
Now, let's see how to make our own personal custom toolbar. Perhaps it's a set of our favorite tools, or tools related to a particular project. Select "New Toolbar" and let's call it "Favorites". It pops up here as an empty toolbar. Now just drag the tools you want into it. It's that simple. Afterwards, perhaps even close out all the other toolbars, if you want.
So that's about it on SeaDAS toolbars. I will point out, that NOT every tool available in SeaDAS has an access point within the one of the toolbars. Some tools are ONLY found in the Menu or via the text-search tool. Also if you are a user of the SNAP application, you will notice that the toolbar arrangement, the toolbar names, what tools are contained in each toolbar, and even many of the icons do differ from SeaDAS settings. But the toolbar concept is the same. Now you should have a good grasp on what SeaDAS toolbars are and how you can use them to customize your SeaDAS application.
Check the description below of this video for links to the SeaDAS web page and any addendum notes to this video which we may add subsequent to the publication of this video. YouTube comments are disabled on this channel, but you can seek further help and report any issues on the SeaDAS user community forum. Click subscribe and the notification bell to stay informed as we will be releasing new video content on this channel.
SeaDAS Tutorial Series: Toolbars
This video shows how to use SeaDAS Toolbars and fully customize them to put the tools you need right where you need them, conveniently accessible at the top of your application.
SeaDAS Version (as of this video): 8.3.0
SeaDAS Website: https://seadas.gsfc.nasa.gov
NASA Ocean Color Website: https://oceancolor.gsfc.nasa.gov
Video Addendum (Jan 4, 2023): Possible minor bug scenarios (as of SeaDAS 8.3.0):
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If you drag around a lot of toolbars, it is possible you can experience a quirky screen repaint issue where your toolbars seemly disappear. They are actually still there, just drag around any toolbar and everything will refresh or you can close and reopen SeaDAS and everything will be refreshed.
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If you drag a toolbar to create a new row and you then use the "Customize" tool such that you empty out that toolbar causing it to delete, it may still have a phantom indicator that it still occupies the row, possibly causing an empty toolbar row. The rows are managed in the file ~/.seadas8/config/Toolbars/Standard.xml so you can fix this scenario by closing SeaDAS and editing this file accordingly.