The neat, sleak, redesigned interface for MT4 is driving me nuts. While it looks pretty, and I’ve managed to figure out where things go, and it even has some nice features (e.g., the post preview is excellent), I find it slow, slow, slow. Everything is a javascript construct, even the input fields. If you do anything to push the systems — as I do with my 6,000-category WIST “blog” — then it goes from manageably glacial (in MT3) to nearly unusable. That’s as true the post creation side (where it takes about 30 seconds each time to generate the drop down to select categories) as it does on the category management side (where it takes forever to load, and then keeps trying to update itself periodically, all taking forever).
Ugh.
Oh, and the java-controlled drop-down menus are a pain in the ass, as they tend drop down on a casual mouse-over and then obscure the screen, waiting to be clicked on.
Ugh.
I know a big chunk of this stems from my using the system a way it’s not really designed (thousands of categories is possible, but I doubt anyone else is doing it), but it’s still a pain in the patootie, even in those cases where I do something on other than just WIST.
A couple of added notes.
1. It’s not just Java, it’s AJAX. Every element of the screen is live with AJAXy goodness, which lets it be all whizbang, but does add to the complexity and the clicky lag, as well as …
2. … it breaks on my mobile phone’s browser (Opera Mini, though I’m not the only one to run into this problem). Yes, it’s spiffy that AJAX allows all sorts of dynamically spiffy rendering, but by abandoning simple HTML forms, it’s suddenly become less compatible. Ugh.
I really do wish there was a way to drop back to the MT3x interface templates, or have a “simple” version of the screen available.