KoL, How I Love Thee
So Ive been playing alot of KoL lately and am loving it. My only problem is the interface... it's balky, antiquated and very old school. Sometimes this is pretty cool, and I get that the crew are trying to keep the interface lean to save bandwidth, but wouldn't it be better with special AJAX sauce? There are hints at interface improvements mind you. Things like the progress bars, compact interface, MMORPG-like combat bar and the XmlHttpRequest-y skills panel in the top navigation bar, but I still don't think it goes far enough.
I'm working on a simple KoL look-alike, play-alike which is much more AJAXy. I don't intend to release it or anything, but I'd like to show it to KoLites interested and see if there could be a movement towards a nicer, slicker interface.
I love TarD's KoL greasmonkey scripts which are a definite step in the right direction. I think the tabs thing should be optional, and they're certainly a speed boost for power players.
What I really want to see is dynamic updating of page parts, not just refreshing whole frames. I think this would lower the bandwidth tax as well. The other thing is that I think the main screen should not show updates above the main content, but instead maintain a history at the bottom of the center of the screen. Not a permanent, scrolly one, mind, but a nice sticky-last-result with 30 second fades of others, maximum height 30% of the screen sort of deal.
At the moment I'm trying to create a nice way to store encounter trees whcih can be retreived fast which I'll slap into a simple user/session container, written in Python WSGI of course (probably using Werkzeug which is yummy), then I'll work on prettying it up with some delicious jQuery. Mmmm... Sounds like a nice three course meal. I wonder what's for dessert? Maybe some sugary theme juice.