GUI Prototypes

In between sessions or reading to relearn C, I've been goofing around with Xcode to sketch out a prototype GUI for the editor.

I've been mulling over the idea of what the important features of an editor should be.  Clearly, data editing is the most important one, but I think an often-overlooked ease-of-use feature is the ability to quickly transfer the rights to players and/or staff from one organization to another.

As an obsessive-compulsive roster updater, I've found the best editor for the EA Sports hockey video games to be NHLView.  From that inspiration, I've drafted up an early GUI for player/staff transferral.  Ideally, you would select the two teams for the transaction from the drop-down box (sorted alphabetically), highlight the player(s)/staff you would like to transfer (list should be sorted alphabetically in order of LastName, FirstName), then click the appropriate directional arrow.  The rights to the player would then be changed from their existing team to the new one, and the database updated accordingly.

There is an insane amount of data in the EHM database, it would seem.  Mac OS X GUIs are praised as being well-layed out and covenient to navigate to easily find your way.   I'm trying to find a way to break all of this data up into logical chunks for the user to traverse.

Currently, I have split everything into four core data groups:

• Players & Staff, where users can edit every detail pertaining to players, staff, and perform simple transactions between teams or free agents.
• Leagues & Teams, where users can edit league names, conference and division names, awards, etc.
• Locations, where users are able to manipulate data in regards to continents, countries, cities, arenas, etc.
• Injuries, where you can modify existing types of injuries or add your very own ("Eric Lindros, added to injuried reserve on 3/2/2007 due to spontaneous human combustion.")

Under each of those four master categories will be a selection of subcategories to further facilitate finding the information you'd like to edit.

As you can see, I've also Canadianized some of the terms.  While they're terms that fans in North America may be familiar with, it's not necessarily terms European fans may be comfortable with so I would like to add an option to toggle between terms used in EHM itself, and the terms I'm comfortable using that the user can set based on their own preference.