Sure thing. I was trying to do justice to the brand you've been building and match your current tone. Plus, I've been primarily looking at it as stand-alone application. This changes the appearance of the experience.
Do you think your users will have many server connections?
What's the most important thing you want someone to do on this screen — is it a frequent or infrequent action?
Is there an existing product with a launcher/connector that you like? Minecraft, Blizzards Game Launcher?
Functionally, it looks you aim to support quite a few things:
- Welcome a new user to the product
- Communicate essential news about the project, possible release notes
- Provide links to community sources
- Show that a local server is running on a given IP and Port
- Provide statistics about the currently running server (number of users)
- Start / stop a server manually
- Adjust connection settings
- Adjust account settings
- Adjust plug-in settings
- Add a new server
- Edit a server (Rename, change port, delete)
We continue with the process of connecting to a server, handling network/auth errors:
- Connect to a server, communicate timeouts or networking errors
- Authenticate with the server, create an account on a public server, communicate auth errors
- Display a list of projects on the server to join
- Add a new project
- Edit a project (Rename, backup, delete)
- Display server messages
- Provide links to server resources (predominantly website links)
- Join server discussion channel(s)
My first impression was that this was lightweight 'launcher' UI that I wanted out of my way so I could open my IDE and get working. It feels like it's getting heavy before it's time. However, I understand that your big selling feature is the collaboration. I just wonder if the discussion and project/server portal should be part of the launcher / local-server window.
I'm just catching up; I'll keep thinking about it.