Re: DM Secretary 1.0

First, the website-
+ Link to Firefox on webpage. Thanks for supporting the open source
community.

+ The site has a good, clean, organized layout.

- Requiring Java just to navigate your site. Thats a major pain.

Second, the application-
+ You removed the references to experience points. I assume this means
you expect to market this application at some point then as being D20
compatable.

+ You vastly cleaned up the interface. This is a major improvement.

+ You changed from linking to scanned text to actual text that can be
copied/pasted. Thats very helpful.

+/- You included a note about automatically saving data. Personally I'd
rather see a 'Load" and "Save" button beneath each text box. What
happens if you have a ton of text in there and the program fails to
exit normally? If I have a "Load" button I could type up my campaign
notes in notepad and then load them into that window.

+ Adding pictures to the tabs adds some color and eye-candy. Perfectly
useless, but enjoyable either way. A dash of color breaks up the
interface a bit.

- It seems to me that the 'Custom Links' buttons would be more
appropriate on the 'Misc' tab as opposed to the 'Main' tab.

- It doesn't look like you increased the fontsize in the "Notes", "Game
Last Left Off", and "NPC's Have Met" fields.

- It appears I can't maximize the window. Thats a major downer as I
don't want to see my desktop or other documents surrounding the window,
I want maximum space for the app, especially on the Classes tab where I
want to be able to read more of the class descriptions without
scrolling. Same with the Skills and Feats tabs. Please make the
application maximizable.

- I'd recommend increasing the version number of the application by
smaller increments in this early stage of development. At this rate you
are going to be on version 10 in a month.

Feature Requests:
* Dropdown menu on Skills and Feats tabs, above or below the find box.
The dropdown would be populated with the Skill or Feat names. This
would be very helpful.

* Icons on buttons. This would help in quickly 'eyeballing' buttons
without having to read the text on the buttons. I mentioned this
before.

* Battle Box: This could be much more full-featured and have a tab all
its own, a tab specifically for Encounters. This tab would have a "New
Encounter" button that rolls initiative for all participants and
applies appropriate modifiers, and then sorts the list so you can just
read off the top name on the list and say "Go Bob, you're up." You
could also mark a checkbox and a duration dropdown for various
conditions, and each time the new round counter button is pressed
conditions decrement by one. For example, you note that Bob has been
blinded for 9 rounds. Each time you increment the round counter it
reduces Bobs blindness by one round. Then you just look down and notice
"Bobs blindness has 4 rounds left, Steves Hold Person is going to
expire in 3 rounds, and Lisa's Sleep spell expires right now". This is
the single biggest feature I'd like to see expanded on. Running combats
is the most rules intensive part of my games and consumes a majority of
the time. Anything that can be done to make it more fluid and smooth
wins major points with me. Auto-rolling initiative and tracking
conditions is a major time-saver for me. My spreadsheet already does
that, which is why I use it, but I think those features would make a
nice addition to your application.

* Area of Effect templates: It would be cool if you could have a button
on the Tools tab that is for AoE shapes etc, and show the shapes on a
grid or something. This would be nice but is not a major deal.

* Documents Tab: It would be cool if one of the buttons on the left
linked to a URL where you have a frequently updated article or
something, and it loads the webpage in the window on the right. For
example, a button that says "Developers Ramblings" and when clicked a
webpage loads on the right. This page would be different everynow and
then. Just an idea. This way instead of having static buttons on the
left pointing to static files that never change you just change them to
point to "Latest Articles" or something. Again, this is a 'would be
nice if...' feature but not really a big deal.

.

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