I have been travelling without my laptop for two weeks lately. Mainly to reduce screen time. Of course this didn't work. So I browsed the internet on my phone for tutorials, reviews and videos on Boxes.py to get a better idea on how it is used and perceived by its users. To my total shock not everyone seems to agree with the obvious fact that Boxes.py is the very best box generator. 

People are having problems with the complexity of the UI and are overwhelmed by all the options and the number of generators. It's not that I didn't know that in principle. But seeing it "in person" hits differently. It's also not the first time this topic has come up. The "new" gallery style front page was implemented to give a quicker overview - especially to new users.

More Guidance?

My first idea was creating a "Guided Tour"; may be as a video, just the web page and a voice over. The basic things can all be explained with ABox, the most basic generator in Boxes.py,  which is still more complicated than some other simple box generators elsewhere. One the could continue to the UniveralBox, TypeTray, an overview of all generators. But I have never really done a video, don't have a YouTube channel. So this is a whole can of worms I am not quite ready to open.

Also it means admitting that one basically needs a lecture before being able to use Boxes.py. What's next? A Boxes.py bachelors degree?

Previews

Some other - here unnamed - box generators do have previews. Some show the 2D drawing, some even have a 3D rendering. The later is out of the question for Boxes.py. Boxes.py is a combination of turtle graphics and argparse - both stretched beyond their natural limits. It is as 2D as it can be and assembling the pieces into 3D space is more work than the project has received so far.

A 2D preview on the other hand is not that hard to do. Funny enough there actually was a place holder for it in one of the earliest versions of the web interface. But for some reason this has never materialized - until now.

Implementing it was a lot easier than I expected. What took quite a bit was getting the CSS right to one can zoom in and out while still keeping the 100% view dependent on the actual size of the drawing. Enabling the "outside" checkbox does change the size of the box. Scaling the drawing to the same size as before hides this and is likely to confuse users more than it actually helps. On the forth or fifths try it finally did what I wanted.

User Experience?

So the new live preview is online for a while now already. Does this actually help? Does it make it easier to understand what the settings do? Or makes it the UI worse? Are there still things you don't understand?