GUI Design
I stumbled upon an interesting bit of homebrew for the DS a while back by someone that goes by the moniker of ant512 – his blog can be found here. I was speaking to him for a while and suggested that the library could also be done in pure C, and it would probably be a little faster. After the initial laughter I took up the challenge, and within a couple of weeks managed to create something that put a screen and a window on the DS’s touch screen, that project was left for a while as I had other things taking over my free time (work, life, gaming, the usual).
A couple of weeks ago, I found some old notes and started to re-approach the idea, but this time instead of emulating the interface style of one GUI I was going to make my own, and add in the option for the system to look like other GUI’s. At first the GUI will be colour coded (title areas green, size bars blue, etc) but the system will use a bitmap for the interface, thus the system will allow skinning to some extent.
I’ll post some mock-ups of a simple about screen using a couple of different skins at a later date.
The initial goals of the library will be to provide the following:
- Multiple Screens
- Multiple Windows on a screen
- Simple Document Interface Windows
The GUI elements that I want in the basic library are:
- Static boxes
- Edit boxes
- Buttons
- Icons
- Windows
At a later date I would like to add the ability for user created GUI objects, but this will probably not be until version 2 or 3.