The TSW Blog

As I have already mentioned several times in the "Making of TSW WebCoder 2012"-series, I've given a lot of thought to how the usability of WebCoder could be improved, while working on version 2012. Often, it's those small nudges of help that will make you feel at home with a piece of software, allowing you to enjoy it even more. I've tried to find all those situations where working with WebCoder might be a bit cumbersome, perhaps because you don't know the application well enough yet, or perhaps just because a little extra help is needed for a specific situation.

While the "Making of."-series focuses mostly on new major features and heavy improvements for the existing ones, this series will focus on all the little details I have added to make WebCoder easier and more pleasant to use. Therefore these posts might not be as interesting as the rest, but I would like to prove to you that I'm dedicated to making WebCoder better in other ways than just adding new features. These posts will be for the WebCoder-fanatics out there, but the features introduced in them is definitely for everyone, so stay tuned!

Several power users have been requesting a re-redesign of the Settings dialog for the last couple of versions of WebCoder. The most common complaint was the dual-tab layout, where you would have to click one tab to access a range of other tabs. When I initially designed it, I thought it was a great idea, because of the many settings already offered by WebCoder, but as these power users pointed out, it made it a bit hard to discover all the configuration possibilities and navigate between them. Therefore I decided to re-structure the settings dialog for WebCoder 2012, in compliance with the most common user change requests.

WebCoder 2010 Settings dialog

First, a screenshot of the settings dialog currently found in WebCoder 2010:

WebCoder 2012 Settings dialog

And here's one of the same settings, but in WebCoder 2012:

Hopefully this new way of showing the settings will be appreciated by everyone. Feel free to let me know what you think of it :)

Please note that the settings dialog above is still a work in progress and may not be completely identical to the one you will find in the final version of WebCoder 2012.

Disclaimer: WebCoder 2012 is still far from being done. These blog posts are merely to show you what this new version will be like and to give you an impression of the development process. I hope to have the final version of WebCoder 2012 ready in the third quarter of 2012, but nothing is certain yet!

Many of you have asked for a more advanced color dialog, so when creating the Color dialog for WebCoder 2012, I used a different approach, while keeping the ideas from previous versions that I really liked. Here is how the Color Dialog looks in WebCoder 2010:

I always liked it for the color picker and the ability to reach my project colors, but several users wanted the ability to tweak the color selection more, as experienced in image editing applications like PhotoShop. Now, WebCoder is no image editor, so that wasn't quite my goal, but as you will see from the first screenshot, it has gotten way more options for fine tuning your color selection:

I especially like the new color picker, where you can select the base color in different ways and then tweak it with the sliders. The User colors section, where you can add your own colors, has also been simplified. You can now just press Add to get the selected color added to the end of the list - no need to select a free spot for it first. The websafe colors, which was on the first tab in WebCoder 2010, has been combined with the standard colors on the second tab:

And the third tab has been extended to show both project colors AND colors from the active document, if any. This means that you can see the colors already used in your document, grab one and then tweak it into a new color you need:

I hope you like the improvements! Let me know what you think :)

Disclaimer: WebCoder 2012 is still far from being done. These blog posts are merely to show you what this new version will be like and to give you an impression of the development process. I hope to have the final version of WebCoder 2012 ready in the third quarter of 2012, but nothing is certain yet!