ID:1200136
 
First of all, the new pager is awesome! It's vastly more useful than the old, bland one. The old pager hardly even had a purpose in my opinion, other than connecting with friends, since the website was better for browsing games. The new pager also makes it so much easier to find resources.

Also, I want to point out that while the new pager will likely help BYOND in the long term, I don't think you should place any bets on it saving BYOND financially. I think that what really has the potential to do that is the flash client, if enough good games are ported to it, and the SWFs get placed on popular websites. If that happens, then a lot more people will likely find BYOND and this new pager, and will begin pouring in, in ever increasing numbers.

Anyway, these are my suggestions on what could improve the interface:

1. Move the three blue buttons in the corner.
I think the gear menu is in an odd location. It should get moved to the left corner instead, right before the games tab. Then, the tabs and expand/collapse buttons would move over to fill the space. The end result is that the settings are in the usual spot where the file menu would be, and the collapse button is right on the edge of the pane, where it makes the most sense.

2. Make the scrollbars thicker.
I just find them too thin. It's like trying to move a line around, rather than a bar. They are just too small to "find" right away, if that makes sense. It's also kind of hard to pinpoint with the mouse at that size. I think if they were about twice as thick, it would be perfect. Obviously, the arrows on the ends would also need to be more noticeable.

3. Allow jumping through the game/resource list with the Up/Down arrow keys.
I think it would be awesome if this were implemented! It would probably only work in expanded view though. What I mean is when you click a game, and a tab opens, if you then press the Up/Down arrow keys, the currently opened tab will change to the Next/Previous game in the list. This will allow users to find the games and resources they like, very fast, instead of needing to click on each one.

4. Allow maximizing the window, only when the view is expanded.
This should be simple enough. When in collapsed mode, maximizing the window should be disabled. If the user clicks on expand, this should enable maximize and expand the view. If the user maximizes the window, then clicks collapse, it should restore the window size back down, disable maximizing, and return to collapsed mode.
This would be useful if you want to easily read large amounts of text, like documentations, descriptions, or comments, within the pager.

5. Add built-in forum navigation and posting.
I realize this could be challenging to implement, but it would really help to bring everything together. It would also partly redefine the purpose of the pager. It would be a tool not only for easily browsing BYOND games, but also for browsing the BYOND site as a whole. I think it would really help to centralize everything into the new pager, or should I say "browser"? Basically, the actual website would be obsolete compared to what the formatting of an actual BYOND browser would provide. It be like a window into a whole BYOND "universe". This idea partly relies on the maximize suggestion above.

Anyway, I hope this new pager helps BYOND succeed and last.

I may think of more suggestions later.
Thanks for the suggestions. A few thoughts:

1) Personally, I like the buttons on the right-hand side, since that's where I've seen similar items (eg, the Chrome "gear" or the typical "maximize") in other pieces of software. That said, when the pager is expanded the buttons aren't actually on the right; they are in the middle, which I agree is totally awkward and I'm not sure how I overlooked that (I personally don't use the expanded view as much). So I think the solution is to always align them on the right, moving them over when expanded. Barring this, your suggestion of having them always on the left would be better than the current.

2) We've had complaints about the scrollbars not fitting in with the rest of the UI so we will address this and try to improve them.

3) I agree that we could use some more keyboard shortcuts as well as visual feedback of selected items (eg, we could highlight the currently selected game/friend). Also, some users have previously mentioned right-click shortcuts which are somewhat expected in this kind of implementation.

4) We currently put a cap on the width because we have fixed formatting. Primarily, the hub stuff (like the game description) is formatted for a certain pixel width to exactly match the website (which as you can see also uses a fixed formatting).

5) I doubt we'll ever do a full forum implementation because it's a bit silly to use the limited functionality of the embedded browser (which effectively runs IE 7) when it's just as easy to click on the link and use your native browser. That said, I do want to add in a bit of "forumy" feedback such as, for instance, the latest shoutbox comments on user and game pages. That way you could read and write quick comments about a game.
In response to Tom
Tom wrote:
I think the solution is to always align them on the right, moving them over when expanded.

Now that you mention this, it makes a whole lot more sense. When the pager is collapsed, the buttons look fine where they are, but when expanded, it just doesn't feel right. Switching them to the right corner of the right pane when expanded makes sense, and also that keeps them close to the opened tabs.
I have been playing around with the colors, and I am happy that BYOND has an "auto shade" thing going on, but for some colors I think it may go too far. For my theme, I am trying to copy the colors BYOND's site has (to the best of my ability), but the shades that generate from any of the two blue-grey shades on the site will create some brighter color than what I want.

BYOND Pager

Are there any thoughts to maybe toning down the contrast?
We spent quite a bit of time trying to find the best color combinations to automate. We're always open to suggestions though. Of course one option would be to allow users to simply specify the different automated values (I believe there are three active shades at the moment); it just seems like overkill for most people, and, of course, beckons more feature creep.
BTW, one related thing that I think would be cool would be to allow you to save your "theme" and maybe we could even have them uploaded to have some shared ones.
In response to Tom
Tom wrote:
BTW, one related thing that I think would be cool would be to allow you to save your "theme" and maybe we could even have them uploaded to have some shared ones.


I like this, and I want this. At least in the "theme uploading and sharing" you could include the more in-depth customization mentioned above.
Yeah, if you go in your cfg/pager/custom directory, you'll see a file called colors.txt that lets you have full control over the colors. I believe a few of them are redundant at the moment. I guess we could have a "simple" mode for automating colors and an "advanced" mode to set them directly.
Well I know what I will be playing with for awhile.
There's also a CSS file which probably allows you greater customization than intended...played around with it during private testing. Don't recommend touching it unless you know what you're doing, though, might end up breaking the whole thing. (I think I did a few times...)
We currently lockdown a lot of files in that directory so BYOND won't work with them changed (this is mostly to prevent gaming the system via javascript hacks, not that we can really stop that entirely).