Hi,

I know this is something that I can do myself, via a custom UI, and I'll readily admit that laziness is the biggest reason I haven't, but as a lefty using a tablet, my hand tends to cover up a fair bit of the screen when I reach across to the right side to access tools. There's a preference in the tablet OSs to switch to left handed mode, which is intended to be queried by applications so they can properly draw their UI for their users -- making sure that menus appear in the right places, etc. Would it be possible, at some point, to do a left-handed version of the UI (shouldn't take much -- just reverse the positioning of the tool panel so it's on the left instead of the right), and have a setting in the preferences to switch it on? Three values, left, right, and OS-dependent, should cover it; leave it in OS-dependent, and it should do the right thing by default almost all the time. It's the kind of polish feature that MoI has been really good at, and the kind of little thing that makes people into fervent supporters. :-)

Thanks!

/Ella

Hi Ella, I have been meaning to do that for a while, I will see if I can add that in for the next v2 beta.

In the meantime, the custom UI that will do it is attached to this message. Take the attached file MainWindowLayout.xml and copy it over top of the old version which is in the \ui subfolder inside of MoI's main installation folder.

That should get your current version tuned up for you, until that option is available with the next beta.

- Michael

Great! Thanks much.

Hi Ella, I took a look at this setting for the side pane today.

I've got it set up for the next beta with a new entry on the Options dialog to put the Side pane to the left or the right:




I also looked into trying to pick up on the OS setting like you were describing, but unfortunately there were some complications with that.

From what I could find here, that setting is kind of mixed in with another windows setting for menu alignment, rather than it being stored as distinct setting. That looks like it will cause some problems because that same menu alignment setting is also present on non Tablet PC windows and it looks like it would be pretty easy for me to get the wrong setting on non Tablet PC machines, where the standard menu alignment actually corresponds to the left-handed setting on TabletPC... So rather than risk getting the wrong information I just made it a simple Left/Right choice.

- Michael

Yeah, that makes sense -- if the automatic option was straight forward, it would make sense to use it, but this accomplishes the same thing.