Arthur, it shouldn’t be that difficult to make a date typing thing, surely? Have a day selector, month selector and year selector, but allow typing. (It’s possible; I’ve done it before). Then people can type “2912005”. If they don’t know which way to type, the drop down list hints towards the D/M/Y format.
Your new design looks very nice. I suggest changing the left side so that it has just three rows: Dreams, Characters, and Symbols (what are symbols? Signs?) You can have New or Add on the left (indicated by a plus sign) and Search or Browse on the right (indicated by a magnifying glass, probably).
Extend the title field to the right border of the main dream entry field.
Formatting buttons are more usually put above the text field, like in this forum, every other forum I’ve seen, Microsoft Word, Wordpad, every other rich text editor and HTML editor I’ve seen… .
I think the rating should be -5 to +5, which is sort of more logical.
Custom stats entry would be a drop-down list on the left with a list (“Vividness”, “Lucidity”, “Scene”, “Keywords”) and on the right would be a text box or a multiple choice box. So:
- Vividness could be provided by default, and it is “Very vivid” … “Normal” … “Very faint memory” (multiple choice)
- Lucidity could be provided by default, and it is “Highly lucid” … “Some lucidity” … “No lucidity” (multiple choice)
- Scene could be user-made and perhaps it would be “Night” or “Day” (multiple choice)
- Keywords could be user-made and that user decided to put keywords into it seperated by spaces for easy searching (text box)
Note that the default ones work just like the user-made ones - you can delete them and whatever. This makes everything more consistent. If all the custom stats were deleted, there could be a blank space there or a message.
I wonder what’s in the “Options” menu? Ideally there will be one option dialog with tabs. This is because on the first run of the program, people will want to look at every option. (Examples of clever programs which do this are KDE and AIM, which both have a lot of options. Bad programs include Windows Control Panel and Gnome.) Therefore, it’s one menu entry - perhaps under “Tools”.
I wonder what’s in the “Extras” menu?
There’s no need to show the date recorded - it is, after all, the current time and date, always available on the bottom-right. The occasional minute change will distract.