Quick, first-impressions usability notes

Spent a few minutes playing with the map editor, deliberately *not* looking at any documentation: (First off: no markdown support in the forum software? For shame.) + Generally: too many simple icons in use without visible text. This is common in mobile apps, but in a full screen desktop app it would be nice to have some context. The "Turn Order" window is particularly bad: all you see is the token artwork to identify the combatants. What happens if you reuse artwork for 13 mooks? + Do tokens really not have "names"? I can't find a way to label one "Orc 1" or "Vole d'Morte" or whatever. + Zoom doesn't seem to work. I get the rollover menu when my mouse hovers over the hourglass, but clicking on it just flashes a box on the screen (presumably the menu?) that then vanishes. + More broadly: zoom via menu is a bad UI. Pinch zoom is obviously the gold standard, but this isn't a touchscreen app. Zoom via scroll wheel a-la Google Maps is still much better though. Alternatively a grabbable animated handle would be nice. + The top level frame has a horizontal scrollbar that doesn't go away (and looks *really* confusing next to the horizontal scroll bar for the map). + More broadly again: split horizontal and vertical scroll bars for a 2D area are a poor UI. Again, look to Google Maps, which does "grab and drag" very intuitively. + Drawing a "freeform" shape lacks control over the fill color like drawing rectangles does. + I can't figure out how to delete objects I've drawn. The "Delete" key, standard in desktop apps, doesn't work. + The corner radius control on rectangles is cute, but very confusing. Also: I'm at a total loss for what I'd use that for. + The "measure" tool appears to be reporting the maximum of the horizontal and vertical displacement. This is the 4e D&D distance metric, not the 3e one which uses the "every other diagonal costs two" rule. Since you're striving to be system-independent, maybe either delete this tool or have report a true cartesian distance? + Pulling down the "pages" menu from the top works well enough (though the icon is IMHO a little confusing).

Oops, the last point was unfinished: ... but once the pages are displayed it's actually difficult to find that little tab again. I got stuck. How about a classic "X" close button instead, or else dimiss on a click to any inactive area.

To address the 'delete objects' point... Simply right click and select delete. Unless you're referring to something else.

The 'delete button not deleting' thing caught me too; it is apparently going to be fixed. Backspace delete objects.

Screenshot with weird horizontal scrollbar. This is Chrome 18.0.1025.268 running on Fedora 16. The scrollbar is full width regardless of window size, and never goes away.

Consider this comment another vote for mousewheel-zoom :) The click-then-click-the-dropdown for zoom was a bit... unergonomic. :)

I'd like the grabby-hand "googlemaps" (and also Acrobat) page scrolling mentioned in the OP as well. Click-and-hold middle-mouse button scrolling sort of works, but it is creating a "select" box that selects everything it passes over.

BTW: On a multi-touch touchpad the current scrolling works very well (move two fingers in any direction and the map follows). So while I'm for mouse-wheel zooming, I'd hate to see that feature lost for those who have Macs with pads.

WASD to pan and Q and E to zoom in and out might be useful, too.

WASD to pan and Q and E to zoom in and out might be useful, too. This. Maybe +/- to zoom in/out

Theres no shame in that. But it is a good thing to know about a developer... its amazing how many of us have such remarkably different preferences. I'm going to throw my hat in with the gMaps-grabbyhand/WASD pan crew, unless its a brutal thing to code in. In which case even an older style mapping software zoom, like.. hover over where you want the zoom to focus in on and scroll wheel. Still better than trying to navigate by mouseclicking a scrollbar.

Regarding WASD: this is a geek-friendly app, not a game. If letters are overloaded to be scrolling controls, it needs to be HJKL or I'm gonna shoot someone. And in any case the arrow keys already do that, so I don't see much point to overloading the keyboard.