Entry #1 - A solution to common problems.
Entry posted by RichardG
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Hi readers. Before you go any further I want you to be open minded about what I'm trying to accomplish
here. I also would like to say that this is a work in progress and is currently for my own personal use.
I decided to create this project for something to do, for good coding standards practice and I like a
challenge, I'm a programmer if you haven't already guessed.
I decided to create this blog because I wanted to share what I'm doing with the community, whether
or not people are for or against toolkits it's still interesting to see what's still going on 'out there' and I
can use it as a sort of log.
An Introduction
What I am trying to do is create an open source (all code is visible) online toolkit for our favourite game.
I'm also trying to make something a little different. I believe that annoying problems exist with the toolkits
that are currently available such as :
- Safety - Is the application Actually safe?
- Clutter - Most people only want the basic tools
- Usability - I don't think there is a Toolkit out there that has a nice clean tab interface, can you name one?
Here is an overview of how I'm tackling these issues.
Safety
I've decided to make my project open source by only using HTML, CSS and Javascript to code it. The
problem with other software is that you don't know what's actually going on 'behind the scenes'.
Clutter
In my experience a reason a lot of players don't use toolkits is because they have a lot of 'crap' built in.
I just decided to stick with the basics (guides, database lookups and calculators). I bet most users do
something like this :
- Opens a page to find something
- Search...click...scroll
- Ok done. (closes tab/window)
so there is a lot of unused functionality.
Usability
I love designing interfaces but this proved to be quite a challenge. I wanted to build something that
would be useful, spacious but could also be completely hidden away when the user justs wants to play
RS. The interface consists of a sidebar and a bar running along the top of the game (a bit like Tiko, but better).
I also eliminated the scrollbar entirely! It has been replaced with two buttons that scroll through the
content. The content will also resize to match the window height which is a good, useful thing that
took Ages to get right.
It's better to show than tell so here are a few screenshots of what I have so far:
(I was working on the menu for the task diaries today so it's still not done)
(I also stole the colour scheme from forum.tip.it. I hope they don't mind ^^)
Thanks for taking an interest if you are still reading. I'll be posting more as I update Toolscape ^^
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