Inform 7 news: Wade Clarke's new Menus and Basic Help Menu now available in the public library

After much file-wrangling by the Inform extensions file-wrangler, Mark Musante, for which I am grateful, two new versions of extensions of mine have debuted in the Inform 7 public library this week. They are Menus version 4 and Basic Help Menu version 3.

• If you're using Mac OS X, the extensions are available from the public library section in the Inform 7 application. With your internet turned on, click the Extensions tab at the lower right of your window, then the Public Library tab in the top right corner. The extensions are in section 11.2 - 'Out of World Actions and Effects' - 'Helping and Hinting'.)

• If you're using another platform, visit the rough'n'ready for-now folder equivalent of the public library online: http://www.emshort.com/pl/payloads/

About Menus 4

As previously advertised, my Menus is a significant update of Emily Short's old/classic Menus with a lot of additional features which make it more modern and flexible. I consider the most important of these to be:

1. Single keypress operation – no need to scroll a cursor about, and
2. Has a screen reader mode for screen reader-compatibility

These features alone make a menu system powered by this extension far more accessible to anyone playing on a mobile device or using a screen reader. In this light, I strongly recommend that folks wanting to add menus to any new Inform 6L38 project build it with my Menus extension rather than the old Menus.

By the way, I should point out I'm not obliviously shaving skin off Emily Short's nose. I discussed the state of the menus extensions with both her and Inform code maestro Dannii Willis, and we've all been looking at ways forward. My Menus extension doesn't have exactly the same API (Application-Programming Interface) as Emily's, so it's for the sake of compatibility with old projects that the old Menus remains in the public library rather than being replaced by mine. Also, Dannii has plans to revamp Emily's extension in such a way that it will have some of the features of mine but will also retain Emily's API for backwards compatibility. If that comes about, that may be the extension which replaces Emily's in the library.

Basically, my extension is ready to go now, addresses some accessibility issues, has some cool and powerful extra features and has already been through three iterations of polishing and bug-removal.

If you're wondering why I changed the API in my extension, I had to to support some more of its advanced features, like the book mode with automatic pagination.

About Basic Help Menu 3

This extension is the equivalent of Emily's old Basic Help Menu, just recoded for compatibility with my own Menus and with the help information updated to reflect the times in which we live. It adds a Basic Help Menu to your project which contains some how-to-play parser IF info.