Sunday, June 11, 2006

Dev go d'oh

I was just browsing the Jer's Novel Writer forums (I often browse the forums of other writing programs to keep on top of what the users out there want, and I also think that Jer's is a lovely program - there's always a copy in my Applications folder). I came across a post in which a user is requesting the ability to see more than one outline at the same time, and I nearly slapped my forehead. I nearly made a very silly mistake in the new interface. In the new design, I have an "outliner" and a "corkboard" icon in the toolbar. Clicking on one of them puts the current document into that mode, showing an outline or a corkboard in the document view (clicking on them again toggles the document out of that mode). However, I had it so that once you clicked on, say, the outliner, the outliner would then take over the whole view. So that even if you had two different documents open in a split view, the focussed document would become an outline and the other document would be hidden so long as the outline was visible. What was I thinking? This is completely counter-intuitive. It's obvious to me now that the outline should only take over the selected split view. That way you can have two outlines, or two corkboards, open at the same time. Now that is going to be cool.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home