First glance

A long time ago I promised preview images of the new version I’m working on, so here are some first screenshots. The basic layout of these windows are now done but they are not finished yet.

If you have been using the program for a very long time, you’ll notice, that just like originally, the different parts of the interface can be on their own windows again. It was for technical reasons why I had to get rid of that before. Now that I’m rewriting the program from scratch, I had a chance to fix that. The other image shows them all docked, plus some addition.

The original interface was a bit crowded, and you will still be able to make it so if you like. It’ll only depend on the user what they want to see and where, and hopefully in an intuitive way. It’s not shown, but the program will start with a single dictionary window and nothing else. With this I’m hoping it’ll be easier to start using zkanji than it was before.

Unfortunately this choice is not without issues. In the current version you can select most features from the main menu. With multiple floating or randomly docked windows though, it’s difficult to tell what window will be affected when using the menu. It would be possible to place a main menu on every floating window, but not after they are docked. I often use program menus to discover features not visible right away. That will be limited for now.

The buttons feature SVG images. Unlike images made up of pixels, SVG can be made larger on request without losing quality. If they are too small though, the image can easily come out blurred too much (when lines are drawn “between” pixels.) To avoid this, I design the interface at its smallest size and edit the images until they are drawn right. I have no idea how this will look like at larger sizes. I received some images from a kind user before, but I couldn’t use them because of this. I have to make the images just right at that size. It’s a bit time consuming.

Feature wise, the program is getting close to the original. It’s the small usability improvements that are missing, along with the main menu, popup menus, settings, safety belts (message boxes asking users if they really want to do some destructive thing), images on many buttons (still), user data export/import (half done), etc. When will it be ready? I don’t know yet.