I love this screenshot that Nantuko's submitted. It looks great and it is only a small change. I've gotten really stuck trying to write a decent user interface. This screenshot is fabulous, so I'm going to use that code so I can get into the nitty-gritty of programming cards and other Magic rules like phases and combat.(By the way, most programmers *hate* writing user interfaces. They have to be idiot proof for the end-user and they also have to be *pretty*. Most programmers are almost color blind and they think gray is a pretty color. Needless to say, much of MTG Forge is gray.)
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as for me I get pleasure from programming user interfaces, may be, because at my previous job I was responsible for it for 5 years :)
once you wrote that 100% finished project is much better than 90%. it is so, but sometimes 90% with gui is better than 100% without it. Actually user doesn't see all the code and all the features you wrote. so you can postpone some feature to enhance interface.
though sometimes I think "why I should waste time on it? there are a lot of other work to do"
User Interface programming is essential to gaining users. Most people who "USE" computers for any length of time get into certain habits from their pet programs and get used to certain features common to gui's. Take that away and even an expert user will have trouble with your program. I can see some people doing that deliberately to sepparate the chaff from the wheat so to speak but in games it makes no sense at all. So I am all for better UI.
Probably a 50% done project is worth more than a 100% done project if it has a pretty good gui. (Using a bad gui is very, very painful).
I also previous wrote that most free (open source) programs have bad gui's because they are hard to write.
I tend to disagree on the statement "most programmers *hate* writing user interfaces."
Especially game programmers and Demo makers are really interested in the "coolness" factor of the game, which IMO is a huge part (the fun part) of the interface.
There are also lots of programmers wo are concerned with the user friendliness of their apps. Although most of them are probably not in the Linux/open source world, probably (I am myself a Linux user, I don't intend to start a flame war here)
Its probably fairer to say "Most programmers Forge is familiar with...dislike writing UIs." because some programmers I know focus entirely on UI development...
On the other hand it IS a common gripe among hobbyists (non professionals).
I happen to like toying with user interfaces in web designs (menuing, moving boxes, drawing things on screen via dhtml and dom manipulation etc...but I dont think Id like it all that much if I had to make the tools to do that from scratch.
As someone who plays with a real placemat, i suggest you add like a 'placemat' option where you can use a picture of a placemat for your e-cards, maybe like 5 preset ones for each color, and an option to upload your own picture, or just have a picture of a table in the background
@ecanimater, can you post a url to a placemat. I would like to see what they look like. Also, what are the benefits of using a placemat?
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