The reason I decided to back OWM is the promised simplicity of use. Autofractalization, following shapes, stuff like that. Now that I’ve been using it for a few days, I think that the ease of use could be improved in a few areas. Please treat this post as an invitation to a discussion. (Hopefully, some other backers will chip in, as well.)
1) I hate the fact that the toolbox doesn’t have a fixed position. I know it is what Photoshop and GIMP and others do, but is it really necessary? We have plenty of room in the toolbar at the top. Why not have the tools find a new home there? I hate how the toolbox seems to always get in the way of my work.
2) Why are the tooltips displayed in the status bar at the bottom of the screen and not as popups? It took me a good while to figure out there even were tooltips in OWM. Why not use a well established standard?
4) I feel that the property selectors are too cluttered. This is the big one for me, so I’ll dedicate the rest of the post to them.
First a compliment: It took me a while to get how it works, but I like the way you can rearrange and fix the position of the property windows. Very slick.
Now on to the things I like a little less.
As I said, property windows have a lot of options and feel cluttered. Most of the time, I don’t want to create a new color set for every item I add. On most maps, I will have some presets I will use over and over. I want all my rivers to use the same style. I want my forests to look consistent. Etc.
What that means is, I think that what you should expose are a palette of “sensible defaults” for item and canvas properties, where you could also save your own schemes. Only after double clicking on a palette item would a window with options to change color, etc., open. Think something like the effects on the left in this picture:
![Image](http://dx54ed3r88ipb.cloudfront.net/upload/Screen%20Shot%202014-07-07%20at%204.52.53%20PM.png)
Or like this palette:
![Image](http://www.fiftythree.com/assets/blog/1.2-Color-Studies/palette1.jpg)
You would have to open a new "color" to drill down to options. You could also save new settings to that palette. Having predefined object types would open the room for batch operations - e.g., I could use the region tool to draw various elevations, and then change the style of all the elevations of the same type at once. (It *kinda* is that way, but the detailed options are overexposed and clutter the UI which could be way more elegant.)
You could similarly have default editable “brushes” in other tools for lines, etc.
One last thing: Map properties doesn't feel to me like something that should be on the screen by default. I think this is something you should select as a part of new map creation, and would open it from the menu if you need to change it. I have never needed it after I set it up at the beginning, and it takes away screen real estate and adds to the clutter.
What do you think?