Improving the Atelier Add-Ins and Templates dialogs

Article

John Murray · May 27, 2016 1m read

Please make these dialogs easier to use, for example by treating a double-click on a list item as a signal to select the item and effectively click the "Next" or "Finish" button. Using Tools\Add-Ins as my example, on the first page:

I want to double-click on a project and get to the next page. At the moment I have to click it, then click the "Next" button. And on the next page:

it's not as easy as it could be to select and run my chosen add-in.

While on the subject of streamlining this area, when I invoke "Tools\Add-Ins" while an open document is selected, I suggest you use the project of that document and go directly to the second page of the Add-In wizard (i.e. the one in the screenshot immediately above). If for some reason I want to pick an add-in for a different project I'll still be able to use the "Back" button to get to the "Select a project" page. At the moment you take me to the "Select a project" page and don't even pre-select the current project:

Two other minor gripes:

1. The second dialog above is titled "Add-In Template". This is confusing, because add-ins and templates are two different things. I think that title should just read "Add-In".

2. The text at the top of the Tools\Templates dialog is "Select an Template" but should be "Select a Template".

All screenshots above are from 1.0.165.

Patrick Newton · May 27, 2016

This all makes sense. I've asked for there to be scheduled a thorough review of those places in Atelier where a project needs to be selected so that we can implement a consistent selection strategy. Thanks for bringing this to our attention

2 0

John Murray · Oct 18, 2016

I've just re-checked in the latest published build, 1.0.255. There's no sign of any improvement on these. I hope you haven't lost sight of them.

0 0

John Murray · Feb 15, 2018

For the record, the following two enhancement requests got raised in Jira last month after I followed up with WRC on this post:

ATL-4848: Allow double-click for Next in Add-Ins and Templates. Let users double-click selections to proceed to the next Add-Ins screen, instead of having to use the Next/Finish buttons.
ATL-4849: Automatically use selected Atelier project for Add-Ins. Two potential options to save a user clicks when they have a project selected in the Atelier Explorer:
Use the selected project and jump straight to showing the second Add-Ins screen, "Select an Add-In". Then users can hit the Back button to pick a different project.
Automatically highlight the project selected in the Atelier Explorer on the first Add-Ins screen, "Select a project".

At this point neither has been slated for a particular Atelier release, so if you make use of add-ins or templates from Atelier and want to lobby for these improvements, you know which ATL-numbers to mention.