First of all, due to lots of people wanting me not to wait, I won't wait until Wednesday and will email Apple tomorrow (it being five business days from their email.) Now that that is out of the way, if you've been following my NaNoWriMo writing blog at http://archimage-writing.posterous.com/ you may have noticed Auteureist is looking a little different.
I'm busy working on 1.1 and one of the major changes (although not a new feature) is that I have been talking about simplifying the UI and making it more intuitive. Well, I'm well on the way to achieving that goal. I've cleaned up all the bugs I know about and have begun reworking the interface. Once you get 1.0 you'll soon discover it works nicely, but the toolbars are not very friendly to get around in. There are extra taps and the UI isn't as smart as it could be. I won't go into the details, but I didn't like how many taps you needed to go through to get stuff done. So I've simplified the UI and reduced the number of taps required. Just from an aesthetic point of view, Auteureist looks nicer, and simpler.
Here is a before shot of the Chapter-specific Summary Screen:
Here is the new look:
The main difference is that there is now only a single toolbar instead of two. This simplifies the flow a great deal, and removes the confusion the two bars created. Now, using it is very intuitive. The toolbar changes depending on whether you are in novel-wide or chapter-specific mode automatically, you always know what mode you're in. The above screenshot is chapter-specific mode. Here is the corresponding novel-wide mode:
As you can see, the color changes from light-blue to light-green when moving from novel to chapter view and the first button in the toolbar changes (I haven't finalized on the color choices. I am thinking of retaining the light/dark grey of the dual toolbars. Let me know what you think). Before, you either had one or two toolbars depending on the mode. The star button switches you back to novel view. The second button (chapters) returns you back to the chapter list. That's a lot simpler--believe me. The app is also a lot smarter about what you probably want to do next. For example, the new UI assumes that when you create a new Novel, you probably want to create a new chapter and edit it. In 1.0, you had to tap each of these steps, now the number of taps is reduced to a minimum.
That's the major change. There are also a bunch of less important changes, that are however nice. Changing the order of novels or chapters within a novel is convenient. The Novel and Chapter Edit Views now give you the ability to directly enter an exact target word count, rather than using the slider (which can be temperamental for exact values. Selecting between 1999 and 2000 is a bit hard using the slider, typing in 2000 is easy. Also, the Chapter Edit Screen now shows you the actual number of words along with the target word count, so you don't have to edit the chapter to get a word count. Note the "Word Count" label here.
In order to simplify the toolbars into a single one, I have had to redefine what the star button does. It used to mean "Edit the Chapter", now it means "Go back to the Novel Edit Screen". As a result, I've added a new "Edit" button in the Chapter Edit Screen that will take you to the actual text of the chapter. Also, I got rid of the button in the Chapter Text Edit Screen that toggles between full and normal screen modes. This is now a transparent hot-spot. It just looks less intrusive. And as I mentioned in an earlier post, you now have backup/restore progress indicators.
Overall, things just look and feel a lot more polished. I'll continue streamlining the screens and how they look and what they do. This is just an early peek at what's in store for 1.1.
