Frodo Wii News - A peek at the new Frodo menus

Frodo Wii News - A peek at the new Frodo menus

I suppose I should post more here, but I seem to always have something else to do.

Over the vacations I've continued working on the Frodo/Wii project. The focus of the work has been on improving the GUI (the menu), which has been the most frequent improvement suggestion I've got. It's sad in some ways since the current menu is functional, but I guess I should know that it's very important how a program looks in addition to how it actually works.

So I'm trying to improve on that situation and also make the code better, and I'm slowly getting there. You can see some screenshots here:

So it's still ugly you say? Well, I've got good news for you - you can change that! The new GUI is themeable, and the blobs you see here are really just PNG images and can be changed to whatever you want them to display. The font is also replaceable and you can make the background just as nice as you want! In the images, you can also see some of the features: The disk browser will load an information page for each game (if it exists), the virtual keyboard now pops up on top of the underlying code and there is integrated help bubbles for every option (almost).

I'm also doing a total refactoring of the code, which is why this has taken so much time. The old code was ported from an old Mophun project and was written in C. The new code is all C++, much easier to extend on and is not that tightly integrated into Frodo. It's currently a bit over 4100 lines of code, most of which is taken up by the virtual keyboard and the joystick binding code.

Alas, there are still stuff to do before this is in releasable state:

Make Frodo use 16-bit graphics (or really, whatever is the default for the platform)

Use the SDL joystick support instead of hardcoding the Wii stuff

Make it possible to actually save screenshots for the game information you see above

Finish up various pieces of the menu which are still missing

Integrate the new menu and throw out the old stuff (I'm doing the development outside of Frodo now)

Fool someone into drawing nicer graphics for the menu :-)

Various network updates (message sending etc)

So all in all, the release is at least some weeks off. An additional problem is that I went and bought an Android phone, a Samsung Spica, which obviously will take some time from the Frodo stuff! So far I'm happy with it, it's quite a step forward compared to my old phone and it's really the first phone which I've felt any urge to use on the Internet.

It will be interesting to see if it will ever get an update to a newer Android release. I took a look at the kernel patches for it, and unfortunately it seems very much like a quick hack. Google does not give much incentive for phone makers to keep their products updated.

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