The Glowfic Constellation

[Moriwen]

Occasionally while writing threads I find myself going "gosh, 99% of the time I am just switching between these two characters, it would be nice to just have a one-click option for swapping between them? like, two or three tiny icons next to the reply box for your top most common characters in the thread, so you could just click on the other one and be done instead of dealing with the pop-up floating box."

But that also seems like it would probably be a huge pain to implement, so I am not, like, suggesting you do so; only that if this is getting reworked anyway it seems not impossible that some way of getting the benefits of the thing I'm wishing for there will come up naturally.

[Alicorn]

Oh gosh I have this want too

[Kappa]

Ooh, it could go along with the "NPC button" for posting from not-any-character, so people will be able to conveniently stop doing the thing where they use a character's account for randos who aren't that person!

[Throne3d]

What do you mean by "like the interface is trying to tell me I'm not allowed to get an intuitive feel for how to change character without unexpected scrolling and/or confusion"...?

I mean that with most interfaces I get a sort of weird – I dunno, synaesthesia feeling for whether things should work or should not and how they work and how they're working (disabled buttons are a strong "nada", hovered buttons are vaguely touched, clicked buttons are of course pressed in and while something's loading there's a clear 'on edge' feeling, typing is weirdly flowy but when I make a typo I usually notice because something went wrong with where my hands were meant to be, etc).

The UI on the Constellation works rather neatly for a lot of things, but doesn't mesh amazingly with this feeling in some respects. The "change character" button feels bizarre because I click it, it's solid, the hovering box appears somewhere nearby, not totally solid. Clicking somewhere not-on-the-box will remove it and scroll me and possibly select something if I did it wrong, and there's no feedback prior to clicking that it will do such. Extremely not solid and kinda jarring. Clicking in the dropdown will produce a reasonably cluttered list until I search something, but that's expected with such a large dropdown, and then after I select something the hovering box will continue to stay (kinda weird but now kinda expected) until I perform the click-off-the-box thing which makes it disappear or I click the solidly-a-button thing ('change character' button) which also makes it disappear (again, sort of weird). Both of these (I think) also scroll me. This feels extremely bizarre and nonsensically fragmented from the rest of the interface, as it mostly does not seem to work like this.

Also it doesn't seem to line up with much neatly (except perhaps the user bar of the info-box), and so it feels like it's just appearing haphazardly each time I click it. I think the main problem is: There's not enough feedback and it's not standard enough with other interfaces, so it's bizarre when I use it.

I also don't know if the weird synaesthetic feelings for when I interact with UI elements is standard or not, so it's quite possible that this all makes precisely no sense to other people and should just be glossed as "it feels like the UI doesn't make sense for [probably these reasons]".

Ooh, it could go along with the "NPC button" for posting from not-any-character, so people will be able to conveniently stop doing the thing where they use a character's account for randos who aren't that person!

I'm not sure where on the interface these buttons would/should go, except inside the character change popup box (which (a) I apparently hate, (b) seems like it'd be suboptimal since it takes more steps to use them).

[MaggieoftheOwls]

Being able to switch between top characters would fix the problem I have where I accidentally switch to my topmost character in alphabetical order instead of one I'm actually using in the thread by accident...

[Unbitwise]

I dunno about user interface synaesthesia but I do observe that perhaps the popup thing could use a drop shadow

[Kappa]

Oh man I do that too, the accidentally switching to first alphabetical character. Something about accidentally clicking twice when I open the thing?

I do not have anything resembling Throne's UI synaesthesia.

I do not think it would make any sense for the top-characters buttons or the NPC button to go inside of the character swap menu; there's already things in the character swap menu that do those things. I'm not sure where they should go instead. UI: Why.

[Throne3d]

I suggested that because then it's two (maybe three) clicks to swap to a character instead of (1) open the character switch dialog, (2) open the dropdown, (3) find the appropriate element, (4) click it, (5) close the UI, which still seems like an improvement.

Other suggestions are four squares to the bottom of the infobox (NPC, then the default icons of the last three used characters). I suggest four because I expect they'll be recognizable at that size while also condensed, but it may be better to do three or two rows of two, as I lack information on how small is "too small" for most people (I'm personally fine with rather small UI elements). I would also suggest above the infobox but this seems like it would be a bad idea because (a) it moves a rather staple UI element, (b) it would probably be slightly awkward to do in the code.

The "accidentally switching to first alphabetical character" has happened to me too. It usually is because the dropdown opens and then you move the cursor and life the mouse button while hovering over another entry, and inconveniently this can swap to the first character alphabetically unexpectedly. I'm not sure how to fix this except to see if Select2 has a way to disable this style of dropdown (which can be found when right-clicking on Ubuntu, at least, since you can hold right-click and then hover an item and let go and it'll select it).

[Kappa]

oh, huh, I didn't even notice that you click to make the dropdown appear and then click the dropdown again to make it, uh, drop. that seems suboptimal on reflection.

[Moriwen]

Today in Constellation requests: could the "edit gallery" mode have an option for deleting icons?