I haven't spent a huge amount of time yet with OWM (probably ~20 hours with Beta 3 and now ~5 with Beta 4), due to life things being obstructionist, but I have a few comments/requests regarding navigation and manipulation. Most of them are minor pet peeves.
I know some of these have already been mentioned around here, but rather than dredge up misc. threads to add my two cents on them, I figured I'd just drop them all in one post.1. Control points. I have a really hard time selecting control points when at wide zoom. I don't think this is just a matter of me getting used to the interface, because I have no problem when zoomed in. It seems to me like the 'target zone' for manipulating the control point and the visible red dot aren't scaling the same way. It'd be a huge boon to users, I think, if these were better aligned; there's a lot of frustration in having to click a dozen times to move a coastline point, or zooming in and out all the time.
2. Click to Follow Contour. I'm also having a lot of trouble with getting 'follow contour' to work. I think this is more specific to Beta 4; I don't recall having as much trouble with Beta 3. I'll click half a dozen times when I get the 'click to follow' prompt, and OWM will clearly do something, but it isn't following the contour. Too, every now and again, one will hie off to the upper left corner of the map and never mind any contours whatsoever! There is much usage of ctrl+Z when I'm trying to do this... also crashed the program once, but I'm not sure that's even a replicable situation.
3. Zoom position. Related to the above, I wind up zooming in a lot to try and reduce both issues. It would be really, really nice to have OWM center on the mouse position when zooming. That way I don't have to scroll over to where I actually need to edit.
4. Sidescrolling. I can currently scroll up-down with the mouse wheel, but I have to actually go drag the scrollbar to go left-right. Also particularly annoying when compounded with all the zooming. Convention in other programs is to use shift+mouse wheel for sidescrolling. I saw elsewhere that's been used for fractals already, but hey, I'll take any solution... some programs distinguish between L and R shift, so perhaps that's an option?
5. Centered map view. Maybe it's just me, but when I'm zoomed all the way out, I like the image to be centered in the pane rather than anchored top-left. I can see the edges more clearly.
6. Default color scheme. Totally unrelated to all the rest! I notice that if I set a different scheme for a map, say Color Overland, I cannot switch back to "Default Color Scheme" later. It'll let me select it, but nothing actually changes.
That's all for now. I'll be back whenever I come up with more...
