Redesigned interface

IMCE is great. I really appreciate it. It is excellent for many sites where img_assist was overload (or wasn't ported to drupal 5 early enough!)

But, it's UI sucks. It defies about every usability rule that exists, and possibly has even caused new ones to be created. I maintain a travel site where travel editors write travel guides right into drupal, and upload their photos inline. IMCE is great for this, but unfortunately writers are writers for a reason, and they're not technologists for an even better reason. When I first checked out IMCE I thought, "Hmmm, this could be a tough block in the UI/UX for our authors and editors..." And left it at that, expecting to need more patience for this feature than others, but that they'd learn.

Today it only took me about 45 seconds of watching our head editor trying desperately to get some sort of achievement and respoonse out of IMCE's browse interface that I had pretend that it was broken, and that I'd let her know when "the problem was fixed". Of course I well knew that imce was in fact not broken, but her ability to interact with it's interface was the issue. However she can't be blamed for being unconfident with computer's, I'm an incompetent writer.

So anyway, I gave IMCE's browse interface an overhaul. Apply the patch to March 31st's dev release if you want to try it out. I'm sure you (and you usuers) will appreciate it!

I haven't tested it extensively yet -- that's partly what our authors and editors are for! I haven't done any testing in IE, as they're expected to use FF when doing content.

It's not perfect, there are a few things that still could be improved:

* a couple of validation errors,
** empty tbody (the table header and table body are sepeerate tables, and the header table has no body)
** id="upload/resizeform" are each duplicated twice. id's must be unique.
** I'll leave those for the IMCE maintainer to consider dealing with. I didn't want to change any ID's or classes as I'm sure there is javascript depending on those IDs.
* the 'resize' tab is blank unless you previously selected an image in the choose tab. It'd be good to disable the resize tab or tell the user to select an image first.
* the directory navigator is usable, but not intuitive. dtree / dhtml_menu / windows explorer files sidebar-style navigator would be more useful here.
* tabs could possibly be more intuitively presented as buttons on a toolbar.
* the design is very simple aesthetically, some graphics / icons etc could considerably further usability. I looked at using tinyMCE's tab interface, but it started looking complicated, and imce is not dependant on tinyMCE, but is optionally integrated with other wysiwyg editors.

Feedback appreciated! :)