1.2 Launcher and browsers
The heart of the MetaEdit+ environment is the Main Launcher as
shown in
Figure 1–2 (please note
that the appearance of the Launcher may vary depending on the user privileges
and the MetaEdit+ version used).
Figure 1–2. MetaEdit+ Launcher.
The top part of the
Launcher window is occupied by the toolbar with buttons for the most often used
operations, such as committing or abandoning the current transaction,
undoing/redoing the latest changes, setting preferences with the Options Tool,
creating new models, generating code and documentation and exporting design
data.
The lower part of the window contains the various browsers
for accessing the design data within the MetaEdit+ environment. New browser
windows can also be launched separately from the Browsers and
Metamodel menus. The browsers each offer their own view on the data
loaded from the repository:
 | Graph
Browser provides a model level view of the design data: all elements are
viewed as parts of the graphs they belong
to. |
| Type
Browser is a tool for accessing elements by their
type. |
| Object
Browser provides a hierarchical view of the design data based on graph,
object and property aggregation
structures. |
Through the browsers, you can not
only view and change design data, but also open models for editing or find out
where certain elements have been used and re-used.
Note that the Launcher window is deliberately sized not to
be full screen. Rather than forcing every MetaEdit+ window to be full screen,
the idea is to be able to have more than one window open and visible, freely
positionable on multiple screens. Research shows this is more effective,
allowing users to more easily integrate information from several
windows.
