my own pet project: Abime MapMaker

[gimbal]

If you can send me a pocket pc I might think about it

[Zetr0]

i recently had mine stolen

my poor lil mobile phone didn`t stand a chance..


so if ANYONE gets offered a T-Mobile MDA with a 512MB MMC containing every emulator under the sun lol, please let me know

[gimbal]

Just thought that I would give an update. Before the first "preview" release (which is by no means an alpha or a beta release yet, just to show what I've been up to) I've been hacking on making the gui less annoying. Less is more is the keyword here, so the app is now starting to anticipate what the user wants to do. For example, when you create a new workspace the "manage iconset" popup automatically appears because without an iconset you can basically do nothing.

Not only that, but check out this screeny:



This screenshot shows clearly what my life has been about the last two weeks. The text box at the bottom I've added to basically all popup windows to just help the user explain what he is looking at. Otherwise you are just staring at a scary listbox with a few buttons and that does NOT look friendly at all.

Other than that its been all about spacing, marges, borders, bold text, button positions, icons, etc. etc. As you can see in the screeny I haven't touched the topic of fonts yet, the font size of the text box is clearly too large. Funny how such a simple thing can instantly make an app look unfriendly. I've had the same with buttons: at first I used buttons with no marges around the text so they stay as small as they can be. It turns out that adding space between the left and right border of a button and it's text makes the buttons somehow more eye pleasing... Yet add space between the top and bottom border and the buttons suddenly start to scream at you.

Fascinating stuff really.


I still have to implement the different floor layers, and when that's done I'm packaging the first preview release so you all can try it out. I'm actually very curious what the different opinions will be.

[gimbal]

This project has been lagging for quite a while now... alas school got in the way, they had me coding applications for four different courses, the gits!

But I have much more time now so I've been putting in some good work again. Basically, layers are implemented and working, which means my first preview version is ready to be judged. I'll create a new topic for it when that time comes (sometime this week). In the mean time you may want to look at the updated todo list (the "done" list is growing quickly), and I've created a new screenshot because the editor has gone through some changes. Good ones, I hope.

http://users.insane-hq.org/~gimbal/m...r/mm_todo.html

Screenshot is from a maximized version just to get a good feeling for the app There is still some tinkering to do with spacing and such, but that stuff is easy compared to what I have already done... Also note the 'layers' tab, that contains a panel from which you can make each seperate layer in the floor visible or invisible (think photoshop, only mine is way uglier at the moment). Both the icon toolbar and the layers toolbar can be individually activated/deactivated and if you deactivate both the whole side panel simply disappears. Because of the tabbed layout of that panel I can easily cram in other toolbars if needed.

[keropi]

good to see u still working on that! keep up the good works man! this tool is great!

[gimbal]

Just wait until you can try it before passing on the kudos But thanks for the enthusiasm anyway