Is this in analogy to the crosshairs icon?

yes

svn 19943 resolves this (barring taking out the view transform action, as that's a design decision that was made with Wendy when we worked out the mouse modes).

I'm not a big fan of the new behavior. I guess it would be good to be tested by Ron and Wendy.
I think having the View Transform action "hides" the annotation feature. It's also odd to have a button always down (never up).
As an improvement, I could see the persistent checkbox being a checkbox on the button instead of a menu option (see what's done in Volume Rendering "Synchronize with Volumes module" button).

From kikinis:
Why do we need a view transform at all? when in placement mode, then the button is depressed and the mouse pointer should change to remind the user that they are in a different mode. When the action is done, undepress the button to get back into rotate/translate mode.

Now that I can change the cursor, I agree that having the view transform button/icon on the tool bar is redundant. I'll work on removing it.

Looking at adding a persistent checkbox on each type of annotation, do you think that would have a better user interaction experience if they wanted to keep annotating a scene with different kinds of annotations? They'd have to click on persistent for each type rather than just once to persistently place all kinds of annotations. Plus that way I'd have to track which ones were persistent or not and the interaction node isn't currently set up that way.

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Okay, that makes more sense. I'll try that.
svn 19989 removes the view transfrom action. When you start up Slicer it comes up with the text "Place" in the button, since the annotations are added at run time to the menu. I'll dig up the code I had used to set a default action in a previous iteration of the mouse mode tool bar. Done: svn 19990.

For adding the persistence check box to the button, I'm not seeing a way to do it with the QToolButton that I'm using. CTK has the ctkCheckablePushButton, though the widget gallery says that the check button controls the checkable state, rather than being a separate checked flag. Did you have a Qt widget in mind?

It was indeed the original behavior, but the checkbox can actually be customized to be connected to something else.
http://www.commontk.org/docs/html/classctkCheckablePushButton.html

However, looking closely, it won't work in this case because:

• it's pushbutton not a toolbutton
• it doesn't support icons
• it doesn't separate the menu click area from the button area (QToolButton and ctkMenuButton do)
  Some work would need to be done to support that type of behavior.

Looks like I can add a menu to the ctkCheckablePushButton, so I'll work on moving the functionality from the QToolButton to a variable of that class, but I have to get some other stuff done first.

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