jshackles:
Been thinking a little bit about Idle Master's UI. I think blacklisting games should be easier. Right now, here are your options:
- If idling for cards, blacklist current game
- Manually blacklist by appid from the blacklist menu
Here are some examples of things you can't do, but that users would want to:
- Blacklist a game in the "idle everything to 2 hours" phase (UI design: right click game name in the box, click blacklist)
- See the full list of upcoming games and blacklist multiples at a time. (UI design: The blacklist page should have two text list panes side by side. The left should be the blacklist. The right should be Games with Card drops. There should be either a <-- --> style UI controls to move stuff on and off the blacklist, or a [+] below the trashcan which adds selections from the right pane. Once games are added to the blacklist, their app name should appear in italics next to the appid.
I've only dabbled in C# and don't have Visual Studio installed right now to be able to test, but a brief google for "add context menu to item in list view c#"
makes it seem easy so I suspect the first of those two suggestions is quite easy.
The second is clearly harder, but from what I can see you should already be able to map IDs to game names by using the data stored in your AllBadges list (I guess if someone blacklists something they don't own you'd have to do a manual lookup, still not that hard). And then the movement between panes doesn't seem like it'd be too difficult. The right pane is pre-populated by the contents of AllBadges less those with IDs matching the contents of the current blacklist. If someone deletes something from the blacklist, add it and regenerate the whole pane on the right. If someone adds something to the blacklist, add it and regenerate the whole pane on the right. You don't even need to worry about the issue of someone blacklisting something they don't own and deleting it, because if you always regenerate the rightmost pane, no problem.
For an example user story / use case of why this might matter, see me. I just opened IdleMaster. I have 247 games to idle. I only idle stuff I don't plan on playing, so maybe 100 games on this list should be blacklisted for now. If I idle one at a time I have pretty good granular control and I'm unlikely to idle something against my will. But then I'm probably paying more in electricity to keep my computer awake than I'm making from cards. If I do the bulk-idle-to-30, my earning potential improves, but there are maybe 6 games on the list of 30 I don't want to idle. So I try to scroll the list to the right part to remember the names, open a browser, look up the id, go into blacklist, add them to the blacklist. And it seems like the bulk-idle doesn't update to reflect blacklist changes, so then I quit and re-open IdleMaster.