The DESCENDING ROAD ELM in this new release of December 30, 2013 contains many changes. Many of these are internal, and encompass numerous software fixes and improvements. A few of the internal changes are of interest to authors; these changes eliminate the WordPerfect-based markup system used and move all markup into the plain-text-file arena. But I’ve made some significant changes to the ELM for readers. The most important address the problems readers encounter when using pad-type and phone-type touch-based device screens that do not respond to hover events such as mouseover and mouseout. Fingers don’t hover – it’s either touch or not.

Until now, reading Descending Road used the visual cues produced when the mouse pointer passed over a link. Touch-driven devices such as pads don’t offer such visual cues, so the reader had to ‘know’ when and where to touch the screen to get some result. This new release addresses a key part of that problem, and even improves on the existing methods in doing so.

The scene pages contained most of the problem cases for the touch-screen user. Now instead of invisible vertical bars alongside the text and unresponsive spaces above and below the text, each scene page shows faint markings and icons to cue the user where to touch for different features. Almost all of the mouseover and mouseout code has been removed altogether, so that except for the vertical side bars, or Z-bars, every scen-page feature can be found visually. To augment and improve this change, the alternate-thread menus at top and bottom, and the buttons at the bottom for Introduction, Author Page, and so on, have all been hidden behind icon buttons that unfold the menus and re-hide them at a touch.

Other minor changes introduce some entertaining and useful features. The SURPRISE ME entry throws the reader into a random scene and story thread. The PUZZLE ME entry transforms the current scene’s text into one of a number of altered forms, some of which will be familiar to some readers. When reaching the end of a story and going to the Singularity scene page, an icon on that page does the same thing as the SURPRISE ME entry in an ordinary scene.

Beginning at the usual basic link to Descending Road now leads the reader to an introduction page for a bit of explanation. From there the reader can choose a story.

One major bug in the ELM, hidden for at least the last five years, has been fixed. It was responsible for the failure of the ELM to follow its story links properly, so that readers would end up back at a menu of stories instead of onward to the proper scene in the thread they wanted. That problem is gone.

Readers of the reference articles may note the addition of two new ones: The Mines of Tarnus and The Aswals of the Cities.

This is the December 30, 2013 release of Descending Road. It is available on the Website at danapaxsonstudio.com for reading online.