Mindstorm's Storm Front

0.63 has been released for testing. There are a couple of big changes in this release; some visible and many under the covers.

Alert Popups
The old alert windows have been replaced with custom popups. There are some pluses and minuses to this approach.

Pluses

• No more multiple alert windows
• Automatic closing of alert windows
• Ability to have more content and custom styles
• Windows are non modal

Minuses

• Can't use the easy javascript alerts
• Windows are non modal

I'll have to get user feedback on the modal issue. For those wondering what modal is, when the pre 0.63 alerts came up, you had to click 'OK' to close the window before you could go back to the main browser window; you were forced to acknowledge the alert. With the non modal alert, you get the alert popup, but you are notforced to click 'OK'. In fact, with the the 0.63 alerts work, just clicking in any part of the browser will automatically close the alert window. Now this makes sense to me and removes the need to explicitly click on the alert to close it, however; it will be interesting to see what you think of it.

The chat options had color themes added and also had color pickers added for the chat highlight colors. This should makes picking your custom chat colors much easier.

Under the hood, the alert notification state tracking has been updated and so far it appears to track all the alert states correctly. It will be interesting to see if alert reliability goes up as the pre 0.63 alerts were 50/50 at best after long browsing sessions. Part of this was due to the modal/multiple alerts while another part was related to the alert state becoming incorrect. With this release I hope things will be better, but I know there is still some tweaking to be done.