Lighthouse Keeper was incredibly hard to design. It looks simple and obvious now, but it took many iterations to get it to what it is now. Unfortunately one piece of the interface has continually bugged me: the source list.

A source list is becoming a key component of any application that stores and organises data on Mac OS X. You can find one in many applications, such as iTunes, Mail, Code Collector Pro and Lighthouse Keeper. Often these are fairly simple but occasionally they get very complicated and Lighthouse Keeper was one of those.

Looking at the screenshot on the right, you may not think too much of it. It looks relatively simple, with projects containing milestones and ticket bin groups. Unfortunately, when you get more than a few projects it starts to become a mess and it's hard to distinguish where one project ends and another begins. So this set me on a quest to build a better source list.

My initial thought was to make the project headers more obvious, by giving them a different background. This would break the source list up visually into chunks. While it did split the source list up it ended up making it more cluttered visually. So, stuck for ideas I did what I normally do: ask others.

After trying a few people on AIM I got a reply that interested me as a neat idea. It hadn't be done before on the Mac for this purpose but it would solve the problem of a cluttered source list. The idea? Make it like the iPhone. So I've spent the past week hacking together a source list that has sliding "pages" to let you navigate the source list. After much playing around I finally got it working and added it to Lighthouse Keeper.

Of course, being something that hasn't been tried before means it needs some usability testing, which is why I'm releasing an alpha of version 1.1 with the new source list which can be downloaded from here. This offers nothing new over 1.0.5 besides the source list and while it should be stable, I have just changed a rather large chunk of the application so there may be bugs.

So I want to hear back from you about what you think of the new source list. Do you like it or do you hate it? Is there anything you found confusing about it? Do you think it should work differently? (Please, no comments about the back button's shape. I know it would work better if it was an arrow shape, I just haven't got the artwork for it yet). Leave any thoughts in the comments or email support@mcubedsw.com. Below are some screenshots showing the new source list:

(1) Comments