Been working on it for a few hours this week, it’s shaping up pretty well. Got some other stuff going on today which may interfere, but hey, that’s life, you know?
Anyhow, there’s some UI elements I’ve been thinking about.
MacDraw did a lot of things right.
[img]http://homepage.mac.com/mesmww/macdrawpalette.gif[/img]
The tool palettes are out of the way, on the edge of the space. The grid is clean, and light- no heavy grid to get in the way. Obviously, the color picker here is super dated, but you get the idea. I’d like to have the option of palettes on the sides of the window, or floating. The toolset is certainly adequate for the job- this isn’t intended to be photoshop after all.
Thumbtacks!
[img]http://homepage.mac.com/mesmww/Thumbtacks.jpg[/img]
These in the upper center or corner of a posted image or whatnot would be EXCELLENT metaphor-extenders. All of your maintenance on an item and statistics (like how many people have it, and so forth) are revealed on a mouseover. If you’re the original uploader and want to remove the item, click the contextual menu that the thumbtack reveals, and BAM, it’s gone.
Eye candy!
Where the REAL spiffyness of this comes is in the usage. Image thumbnails and textboxes should be rotatable. There should be temporary highlighers, like arrows, crawlers, and the like to say “Hey, THIS picture”. They aren’t kept in the shared space forever, rather just to point out something on the board temporarily. This helps with presentations and the like. While showing everyone’s cursor might be interesting, in a Flight of the Bumblebees way, it may be too cumbersome in an internet environment.
