“My Types” Menu Improvements

Things have really been buzzing in the Hive of late. My previous posts described several new features:

In this post I’ll describe some improvements to the “My Types” menu. It’s not terribly exciting like the last two features but I think it is a nice usability change.

Here’s what’s changed:

  • The number of custom types is now in parentheses
  • Types are sorted
  • The list scrolls (as opposed to having one long list)
  • There’s a quick link to manage types
  • Removed the submenus in favor of inline icons

If you have Hiveword Plus (the upgrade to the free Hiveword plan with a two week trial) then you know about Custom Types and Fields. With this capability you can add your own fields to characters, scenes, etc., and you can also add new things (types) to track such as Spells, Spaceships, etc. When you define a custom type you get to add all of the fields you want to describe it.

Once defined, you add an instance of your custom type to the story via the “My Types” menu. Here it is in collapsed view:

You can see that it’s right there with the other type menus such as Scenes. You can also see that there are two types defined.

Upon clicking “My Types” it will open up:

Now we can see the two sorted custom types, Spells and Wands. There are two spells defined in the story but no wands yet. This part hasn’t changed but the other parts of the expanded menu are new.

The “Manage types and fields” menu item takes you to the Custom Types and Fields management page. This saves a click because before you’d have to click on the Dashboard link or Hiveword logo to get to the Dashboard page and from there select the “Types and Fields” menu. Too much work! 😉 Now, you can get there easily.

There are now three icons for each type: Add, List, and Sort. Clicking on one will do that function assuming it’s not disabled (grayed out). Before, these functions were accessible via a third-level menu which required too much dexterity. It’s much easier now.

Finally, the entire list will scroll, if necessary, rather than having an extremely long dropdown menu. In this example, no scrolling is necessary because there are only two types.

I hope you find this tweak to be more user-friendly than before. As usual, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this or anything Hiveword-related. Thanks to Darren B. for making many of the suggestions for the changes mentioned in the last several posts.

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