The lack of posts during past few days is rather an indication of me being too pre-occupied with other things rather than lack of development. In fact, we did a three-night extreme programming session with our designer, with him on Photoshop, me in code and discussions around gui design. A lot of things got cleared up, reviewed and lot of progress made in many areas; some of which I can show now, some of which has to wait a few more days before it can be displayed publically. The GUI codebase is nearing 5000 lines of code already (+1000 lines with three nights).

So here's a screenshot of the current version; explanations / discussion follows.



One of the main things that got changed was the dropping of tabs from all pages of the interface. The tabs were actually an implementation artifact, and never existed in any of our sketches. The functionality that they were intended to represent - filtering / categories / in-page navigation - will be implemented differently or dropped completely, where applicaple.

For example, the concept of 'categories' in transfer / library will be implemented in a tree-like way, pretty much how currently torrents work in the interface - you click on the + sign in front of the name, and the list of files in the torrent opens up, allowing you to manipulate each file of the torrent separately, as you'd do with any other download. Torrent is technically a category of downloads. Same applies to emulecollection (currently not supported by core). User-defined categories will behave the same way - the 'category' object in the list merely becomes a 'virtual download', just like a 'torrent' is a virtual download, composed of multiple 'actual' downloads. You'll be able to drag & drop files into categories. Whether or not you'll be able to drop any kind of files into torrents (or other core-created categories) is being discussed, but from technical point of view, there's no reason why you shouldn't. You start downloading a movie torrent of two files, and then find subtitles (from some other network) for it - logically, you could drop the subtitle downloads into the torrent category, so that they'd be moved to the same destination dir once downloaded, as the movie itself.

Another thing that was added was the details box to the bottom of the window, which will display extended information as well as provide access to some additional data - such as known file names, comments and so on. The details-box can be hidden to free up more space in the interface. It will be available on all pages, displaying relevant content about the page items.

To the right side of the window, we'v planned a help bar, which is 'hide/show' as well (from the ? button at top-right). We have some ideas on what the help should contain, but the actual content is still rather open, since other things have higher priority currently. It's not expected to have the help functionality operational by 0.3 Beta1 (expected to be available next week).

Madcat