I'm not going to announce this on the Bowie board yet because this is in a kind of beta situation right now and there's at least one display bug I still need to fix.
But, I just put something into production that any brave souls among you can feel free to test.
If you go to Tools and My Settings, there's a new option at the bottom of that screen: "Show Message Navigation as:" and the dropdown has the choices "Text" (the default) and "Menu Buttons".
If you change it to "Menu Buttons", the one-at-a-time message-reading screen's going to look a LOT different.
Each of the options will be displayed as a menu button looking just like your top menu rather than text.
The effect is a lot more dramatic (and more pleasing, IMO) if you've gone into "My Interface" and given your menu a 3-D look. For an example of this, go to Tools->My Interface, click the "Bob's Fave" button and click "Save Changes".
Now, before anyone tells me about it, yes, I know there's a display problem with the "menu" below the messages. I'm tracking that one down.
If you try out this interface, I've tried a different approach to it that should result in it being faster, perhaps only on the order of milliseconds. I've never really gone through the message-reading screen and tweaked it as hard as it can be tweaked, and there's lots of room for speed improvement there.
Also, in that interface, there's a new option that I want to try out before including it in the text version of message navigation: "Mark as Last Unread".
This one should prove to be terribly handy. If you click it and you're, say, 30 posts away from the last post on the board, it'll set that as the last unread board on that board and take you to your Favorites screen (since you'll typically only click that when you're done reading the board for a while) and it'll show 30 unread message for that board. Clicking the number of unread messages will take you to the one right after the one you set as your last unread.
I think this'll neatly solve a problem of inconvenience we've had with dealing with unread posts.
Let me know what you think, both from an aesthetics perspective, and functionality.
But, again, I already know about the extra blank "menu" being shown right below the messages and will work on that.
If the Mark as Last Unread thing is working well, I'll include it in the text version of the interface and make it a Premium feature.
Also, I noticed that the "Keep" option only displays for Premium members. I'll change it so that it displays for everybody but when clicked by a non-Premium member, it'll take them to the page telling them that's a Premium function.
And one last thing. Since I added the thing that lets you Keep messages not written to you, it kind of rendered the other kind of Keep (messages written to you) unnecessary. It'll take a while but I'm going to get rid of that other kind of keep, once I determine how many people have Kept messages to them, and work out a way to export those to the other Keep format.
