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From: buzzard@TheWorld.com (Sean T Barrett)
Subject: Re: buzzard 'terp reviews
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Date: Sun, 18 Nov 2001 00:31:07 GMT
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Mike Roberts <mjr-underscore@hotmail.com> wrote:
>Are you aware of the "go/previous page" command?  If so, is that not
>adequate for viewing text from before a screen clear?
>If you aren't aware
>of it, then I clearly haven't created a very good UI for it, since you
>actively wanted the feature but didn't find it.

Nope, but then I didn't even try to find it. I had a perfectly
functional, intuitive scrollback interface that worked--using
page up/down and the scrollbar. It never even crossed my mind
that there would be *more* scrollback with a *different* user
interface.

In hindsight, I can see the design problem you're facing that
leads to that choice.

>By way of defending the page-oriented design, I did it this way for two
>reasons.  First, it seems natural to treat a screen clear as a page break,
>and given that, page back/forward commands seemed a good way to navigate
>among pages.  Second, since the renderer re-flows the entire page on resizes
>and the like, I wanted to take advantage of this opportunity to cut down on
>the amount of text involved in the re-flow.

I don't think it would be outrageous to say "the screen clear
could be rendered in scrollback as a horizontal rule, and you
could structure your page renderer to know about these boundaries
specially and not have to reflow across them"... but hrm, that's
a fair amount of work, and it still doesn't cope well with
resizing the window horizontally.

I guess the multi-page metaphor is a reasonable metaphor, but
it has the problems (for me, I don't know how far these generalize)
that playing IF--even in HTML Tads--is nothing like browsing so
I don't expect a browser metaphor and that I always get rid of all
toolbars in apps since they consume screen real estate offering
features that I use infrequently, so I'm not left with anything
to even hint it at me unless I happen to notice 'Go' and stop
and think what that might mean. But the 'Go' menu option is
always there, along with all sorts of other options I never use,
so it doesn't leap out at me.

Ok, here's a wacky idea: how about at the top of each page of
scrollback having a tiny font that says '[select Go to view
previous pages]'? Or even a "previous page" hyperlink?

Also, regardless, if you're going to stick to the browser metaphor
you should probably add support for 'alt ->' and 'alt <-' as hotkeys
for forward and backwards paging.

SeanB
