mrimer wrote:
Oneiromancer wrote:
Keyboard shortcuts should really be for things that you do over and over again, like copy and paste, not once-in-a-blue-moon events like having to reassign the start level.
One more reason to not take up already scarce screen space with a button that never gets used.
Well, if you don't put it on screen, you will ensure that it never gets used (or, more accurately, that people will keep asking in the forums about it).
My belief is that if you have enough real-estate to devote 5% of the screen to a title-bar that tells people they are in an "
editor"
- a fact I assume most of them know - then you have enough real-estate for as many buttons as you want.
Other places you waste real-estate in this screen:
- The room style list could easily be made half the size with scrollsbars. It's not something people use often.
- For that matter, the hold selector and level selector can also be made shorter if necessary.
- The line where it says "
choose room"
is totally empty other than that admonition - which is rather unnecessary, since it doesn't take a lot of brainpower to figure out what the box below it is for.
- The room screenshot can be made smaller.
- The button that says "
help"
is far less useful than a button for setting a level as the starting level.
Think about how many posts there have been so far - in a short period of time with few people using the editor - about people who don't even know about the ability to cut&paste rooms/levels. This will just increase - documentation will only be read by about 25% of your users, and that's if you're lucky. The screenspace can definitely be made friendlier.
For example, see a mockup of a screen that has everything on it but isn't much more cluttered, and I didn't even use up all the space I could free (ignore my horrendous graphical skills):
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