destructive bitching in the early morning

i'm sorry if you read that as a flame, robert, i surely didn't want to piss anyone off. in order to avoid disappointment, i clearly stated in the headline that my rants today have nothing constructive to offer, so it really shouldn't make you angry.

i liked the old one better. i already stated what's wrong with the new one before. if i recall correctly, there were some intelligent replies to my comment, but no one could mention an advantage of the new look and no one found a flaw in any of my arguments. the discussion ran dry and i thought, so that was that, we'll stick with the old one.

i was very surprised today when i saw an even worse version of the new editor today. i thought, someone must have discovered some advantages in that design, else it wouldn't be here. as i don't see those advantages, i asked some questions. for example, i don't know what the purpose of the headline 'Publish in topics' is. can anyone explain?

i acknowledge on several occasions – and probably will continue to do so – that you guys are doing great work and can be very proud of it. but if you want to improve it, you should take honest criticism a little more serious instead of fending it off with insults, robert. being rude to me doesn't eliminate the flaws i believed to discover, and it definitely decreases the likelyhood that i'll submit my own version. so could you stop that, please?

did it ever occur to you that MovableType looks simpler because it has fewer features?

I don't know much about the features of MoveableType as a whole, but as far as the story editor is concerned, theirs is configurable and may offer both fewer or more options than you see in the screenshot I linked to. It doesn't have a smaller feature set than Antville, but rather a different one. To me, their design looks rather nice and concise, whereas the current Antville story editor is rather ugly and cluttered. If you look at them side by side, I think it's obvious that the number of options is not the only difference.

However, I'm not willing to contribute any other story editor at the moment. Making something better would require a civilised discussion about its various features beforehand. Firstly, if no one can explain why he'd like to implement/discard certain controls, there's no point in making these changes. Secondly, if no one thinks my comments are any good, I don't think anyone would like to use my story editor.

To say something constructive, too: The logic of your new story editor is close to perfect. It even avoids the single flaw I noticed in the existing one (which doesn't explain that you can't create a new topic by posting offline). One thing I'm not sure about is wheter it should really be possible to not put a story into a folder, because this makes it a but complicated. What if you publish something to the frontpage, then change your mind and disable the respective checkbox? One solution would be to have a default 'miscellanous' folder. This folder could show up in the list of all folders (what is currently known as the 'topics' list), but _not_ as a folder/category on the frontpage, even if you normally display topics/categories with the stories on the frontpage. After all, not wanting to have any folder associated with your story in the weblog is the only reason why you wouldn't want to have one, right?

As far as the appearance is concerned, I would get rid of the border (as I said before, I know these things are a matter of personal taste, but as far as these borders go, I trust Apple's HIG, they make sense to me) and change the order of the radio buttons to a more logical one (the author is a part of all contributors which are a part of all subscribers).