Well, bowerbird, You're not following the rules, you know? --- every day, based on feedback given on this list, i will improve the program. you must give some kind of feedback -- reviews, requests, whatever -- on the app _every_day_ --- You got your feedback, so now go ahead and improve the program. Because this is not about what _you_ are interested in at all. You already know how to do all this. This is about what _we_ are interested in, that is, the users of the program. So we learn how to do things properly, remember? And right now _I'm_ your user(s), and _I'm_ interested in a usable interface. And that's my feedback, and you're going to do what your users request, remember? Right now I'm not interested in a full-fledged interface with "roughly 35 variables", because we can't even change 35 different things yet. We can't change anything, in fact, not even the curly quotes or em-dashes. (Though, personally, I'd say no-one will complain about proper dashes and quotation marks if they're done correctly, so I don't consider an option to turn them off even desirable. But if someone else wants it, go ahead and add it.) What I _am_ interested in right now, though, is that the things we _can_ do with your app will be intuitive. It's just a tiny few things so far, so it can't be that hard to build a proper user interface for them. Why not do it right from the start? Oh, and for some reason your interface looks like this for me currently: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3234772/bowerproject/screen-capture01.png No idea how that happened. I didn't do anything differently from before. And here's the current list of things I've asked for that you haven't done yet, apart from the user interface suggestions: * links from the table of contents to the chapters * letting the user choose background and foreground colours * letting the user choose the font to use * jumping to the right spot in a chapter after a search Jana On 2011–02–22, at 00:15, bowerbird@aol.com wrote:

jana-

you're welcome to design the complete interface. :+) do it that way, as a whole, instead of doing it piecemeal.

until we have an app that we know that people will use, i am interested more in functionality than design, but i am responsive to help from people concerned with that.

the only thing i insist on is that we maintain simplicity, a la the best of the philosophies of apple and google... no microsoft clutter-bloat. (i know you're a mac person, so you'll understand what i mean, and most likely agree.)

at this point, this _is_ a tool for knowledgeable users, so we don't need to label everything; we'll save that for later, if/when we decide to make the adaptations for beginners...

-bowerbird

p.s. there are roughly 35 variables we will need to collect from the user in regard to their preferences, so you know. and yes, if need be, we could do this on a second screen...