Am I the only one who feels that the new Welcome Screen is a step backwards? It doesn’t feel like progress. Here is my professional evaluation:
* The Welcome Screen interface doesn’t feel interactive at all. At the very least, moving the mouse over any clickable screen region should change the cursor, and/or change the highlight color of the clickable element.
* It’s hard to tell which areas of the Welcome Screen are clickable just by looking at it. Everything is in a boring shade of gray.
* The “Get Started / Sample Apps / APIs / Forums / Share Code/ Tutorials” links don’t use an appropriate typography / style that make it obvious that they are clickable options.
* The “New Project / Simulator / Dashboard / Demo” icons similarly don’t feel like clickable options. They feel like the gloomy shadow of something that used to be exciting.
* Links that do something within the simulator should be differentiated from links that open a browser window. In fact, This can be achieved by moving “Sample Apps” to an icon, and moving all icons above the text links.
* The “Simulator” icon can be a bit confusing to new users because, well, they already are in the simulator app, and the fact that the Welcome Screen is itself a simulated window adds to the confusion. Perhaps “Simulator” should be renamed “Open App”, as that way it would be obvious that “Simulator” is actually the same thing as “File / Open”. “Sample Apps” should be renamed “Open Sample App”.
* It’s no longer easy to see in a single glance the wide capabilities of Corona. The old Welcome Screen had several demos with informative thumbnails, all located in a single screen. The net result is that new users could quickly explore the cooler features of Corona, without having to know or worry about which icons and screen options to drill down into.
* I love the new “tutorial mode” demos, but at the same time, it confuses the “demo” metaphor with the “screencast” metaphor. When I click on demos, I expect to be able to run them in the simulator. I was quite confused when I first opened the new screencast-style demos.
* The demos “home” icon would be better served as a “back” icon.
* What happened to all the damn cool demos? In my opinion, you should get rid of the “Sample Apps” feature and replace them with a gallery of non-screencast-style demos, each with informative thumbnail and description.
That is all. [import]uid: 71767 topic_id: 19016 reply_id: 319016[/import]