#115319 - alfatreze - Mon Jan 15, 2007 12:46 am
Hello.
I am a licensed Graphic Designer, with several non-profit projects done for open-source and free personal projects, mostly in the real of UI or GUI development.
Since I purchased my DSL, one of the features I anticipated the most was the possibilities for a good eBook Reader program, I have searched & tried every program out there, and while there are a few working solutions, mainly DSOrganize & Moonshell, none of them are particulary geared towards this end, but rather general text reading.
After several forays into DS UI development concepts, proposals for a few collaborations and projects, I was sparked to actually do Interface development for an eBook Reader by a post in Moonbooks project blog, this quickly led me to the project with the current working name of FLIP. A full featured eBook Reader, with an advanced Interface, & great care on what it should do best, read and manage eBooks.
Preview
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PDF File with current concepts & development status!
http://rapidshare.com/files/11742486/Flip_UI_Development.pdf.html
The Interface is still in the early stages of development, but there are already plenty of working material and concepts ready to be guided to actually working proposals with serious backend requirements in mind.
There are no real visual niceties yet because I am developing with the lowest amount of graphical memory footprint in mind, to leave precious ram to where it is more needed. I they can be done later, they will be implemented.
This takes me to the real question, is any developer or team interested in making this project a reality?... a true ebook workhorse, with particular attention to detail & legibility in mind. With a streamlined interface geared for intuitive and easy control, but expansive enough for detailed & powerful work.
I have nothing to offer in return for anyone that may seek it, other than offer my skills as a graphic designer for other personal projects. I have nothing to gain from this, other than a wonderfull program for myself and the community & the friendship & companionship that evolves from collaboration projects.
To apply u can reply in this post, or contact me thru my email > alfatreze@gmail.com
Everyone is free & encouraged to comment, criticize & give advice to this project. Every little bit is noticed & helps design a better software!
#115322 - Lick - Mon Jan 15, 2007 1:08 am
Very neat design. Black, white, grey.. Some functional highlights in color.. Very neat. I would prefer to see some glassy/plasticy effects here and there. Or maybe a glow.
I'm interested. But I wouldn't be able to handle it on my own.
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#115327 - alfatreze - Mon Jan 15, 2007 1:40 am
Well everyone is welcomed, a team would actually be better, since to be really well done, I assume a lot of work will have to go in.
What do you see yourself able to help with, especially considering all the info so far on the PDF.
As i have stated, I is being developed with a low graphical footprint in mind, to leave more headroom for loading large books, and dysplaying beatiful rendered and formatted text, after this has been conceptualized (codewise) & implemented, the UI can be reanalyzed for graphical appeal, taking in mind the resources needed for the improvement, and only it it does not affect the main features adversely!
#115329 - Payk - Mon Jan 15, 2007 2:13 am
well as a quite big opensource community it should be possible.
I mean GPF has ported sdl lib. It includes font loading routines. Could be first step to grap source and take what you need :D ( i dont know licences stuff)
Well if there are opensource readers for pdfs or good documentations a team with 2-3 coders and you as artist should be enough.
Well i dont have much time but i could help to get graphic stuff working and some gui parts.
So lets just say i am interessted, too.
But we need more ppl on it.
#115345 - Vich - Mon Jan 15, 2007 11:52 am
What a nice design!
I'm also interested as a programmer. I'm currently working on a platform library(almost finished) and 2D/3D library that includes a GUI library(that require a few months more work).
Both libraries are cross-platform and work on Windows, Linux, DS and probably more platforms.
Tech stuff:
The first one is called "COW" and does things like streaming, RTTI, serialization, containers. It can serialize objects to and from XML with an adapted TinyXML implementation.
The second one is called "AlterNova" and has a GUI library in progress, texture management and more.
Maybe the second library isn't mature enough(or might not meet the specs of the program), but the COW library might certainly be of interest to you. I wouldn't mind making extra features for it, for the project :)
My MSN is kenvh [at] hotmail [dot] com
I have hobby experience with the things mentioned above and professional experience with in-game HUD programming.
@ Lick: hoi! ^^
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#115351 - alfatreze - Mon Jan 15, 2007 1:46 pm
Nice to see the support so far, I will probably extend the search for the team up until the end of the week. Depends on the amount of interested people, if it goes extremely well I may stop it sooner :). At that point I will make a meeting with every people involved to discuss the project, development possibilities, technologies, assign duties & kickstart the development.
#115352 - Vich - Mon Jan 15, 2007 1:59 pm
Could you tell us what your timezone is? That might be interesting for people that consider cooperation(because of meetings'n'stuff).
Mine's GMT+1, living near Amsterdam.
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#115354 - alfatreze - Mon Jan 15, 2007 2:46 pm
Totally forgot that :)
I'm on GMT 00, I'm usually always up until around 2h in the week, and whatever's necessary on the weekend!
#115581 - alfatreze - Wed Jan 17, 2007 12:18 pm
Ok, the project has kickstarted, & things are starting to shape up. The project is being structured & requirements & job assignments are being setup for each team member. We will still be on the lookout for talented coders that may be interested in joining, but obviously they will not be able to choose what they want to do so easily :P.
As soon as we get our first version out anyone can & is encouraged to look at our source & try to find bugs/post suggestions! Both in the Code, UI and features department!
#115583 - Lick - Wed Jan 17, 2007 1:19 pm
| Vich wrote: |
| @ Lick: hoi! ^^ |
Hallo Vich! :D
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#115610 - HtheB - Wed Jan 17, 2007 9:20 pm
| Lick wrote: |
| Vich wrote: | | @ Lick: hoi! ^^ |
Hallo Vich! :D |
WAuhauhauh more dutch people :P
Hallo allemaal :P
#115612 - alfatreze - Wed Jan 17, 2007 10:35 pm
Mei de hemel zegent alle Nederlandse codeurs met sterkte en intellect vijand alle Te hebben ds- projecten!
Leef lang de Babel vissenvertalingen!
#115632 - Vich - Thu Jan 18, 2007 12:52 am
| alfatreze wrote: |
Mei de hemel zegent alle Nederlandse codeurs met sterkte en intellect vijand alle Te hebben ds- projecten!
Leef lang de Babel vissenvertalingen! |
LOL!
I'm currently creating a candidate planning document that contains regular milestones and general code tasks. I'll share it with you guys thursday night, when it's finished.
I don't want to force anything upon you guys, so we'll discuss the content.
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#115635 - Lick - Thu Jan 18, 2007 1:16 am
That's great, at least we have something to hold onto now. Real bummer that the meeting didn't work out (arghh.. MSN!) yesterday. But we'll meet soon enough.
Vich, do you realize we can call eachother on the phone? Hehe..
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#115676 - Vich - Thu Jan 18, 2007 10:23 am
| Lick wrote: |
That's great, at least we have something to hold onto now. Real bummer that the meeting didn't work out (arghh.. MSN!) yesterday. But we'll meet soon enough.
Vich, do you realize we can call eachother on the phone? Hehe.. |
Haha, yes indeed, I'll give you my mobile phone number for urgent questions when I'm offline. For regular calls we could use Skype, that'll keep the phone bill low ^^
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#115816 - poslundc - Fri Jan 19, 2007 7:54 am
| alfatreze wrote: |
| I am a licensed Graphic Designer |
I am curious what governing professional organization licenses graphic design.
Dan.
#115819 - alfatreze - Fri Jan 19, 2007 10:19 am
| poslundc wrote: |
| alfatreze wrote: | | I am a licensed Graphic Designer |
I am curious what governing professional organization licenses graphic design.
Dan. |
Well for starters my University where I had my graduation, I don't remember exactly what's the counterpart in America, but I believe it to be a Master's Degree is it? A 5 year university graduation?
Then I'm also certified by the Portuguese Design Center.
I don't just know how to use photoshop & dreamweaver & call myself a graphic designer, like unfortunately too many individuals, that often give the profession a bad rep.
#115823 - PhoenixSoft - Fri Jan 19, 2007 10:48 am
Yes, even as a programmer, I can see that you do have some graphic design sense, as opposed to many other Photoshop users. I like it when graphic designers get involved in homebrew like this to break the typical image of homebrew with its "programmer graphics". Projects like this and XBMC show people that homebrew can still be professional quality, and anything that attracts more people to homebrew is a good thing!
| alfatreze wrote: |
Mei de hemel zegent alle Nederlandse codeurs met sterkte en intellect vijand alle Te hebben ds- projecten!
Leef lang de Babel vissenvertalingen! |
It's nice to see more Nederlands / Dutch being spoken in here, even if you do have to resort to the mangled Babelfish translations :p
#115867 - felix123 - Fri Jan 19, 2007 9:19 pm
Will it include support for non ascii character sets? I can help with beta testing.
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#115871 - alfatreze - Fri Jan 19, 2007 9:29 pm
| felix123 wrote: |
| Will it include support for non ascii character sets? I can help with beta testing. |
Well, it is being built that way, but it depends on the development! We are building a rendering engine to be able to take advantage of today's complex font formats, mainly TrueType and Opentype, possibly more. So it should support anything that the font format actually supports. Type encoding is a feature that has not been fully researched so at this point there are no guarantees on what will be implemented in that field.
One thing rests assured though, it will be unlike any reader program currently out there! Just how! hmmm that you'll have to wait and see :)
#116328 - Vich - Wed Jan 24, 2007 1:02 pm
#119871 - spinal_cord - Mon Feb 26, 2007 11:41 pm
So... How is this going (is it going?)
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#119908 - Vich - Tue Feb 27, 2007 11:47 am
| spinal_cord wrote: |
| So... How is this going (is it going?) |
We're developping some things before creating the application framework. I'm currently finishing off a few projects which will be merged into Flip when that's done. The other members are working on things like Wifi and other more hardware-related programming.
Things that I'm working on at the moment:
- COW: the system-independant platform library
- AlterNova: graphics framework
- TINA: system-independant GUI library
You can find more info and source code for these projects on http://home.lifeisdigital.net/
COW is 90% finished for usage with this project. AlterNova is at about 90% too and TINA is at about 50%.
The GUI library will have pretty advanced skinning support through XML and the application will ?lso compile on Linux and Windows for debugging and testnig, because that's a lot easier/faster than the DS. On those PC operating systems, one window will be created that holds the 2 (virtual) DS screens. We will probably not only use that as debugging/development application, but we might publish this as a demo for people without a DS cartridge.
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#132377 - Vich - Tue Jun 26, 2007 10:44 am
We're still alive ;)
I've been busy with the GUI library, which I need to finish first before we can continue. I've created the template system and I can already load images, text and buttons from XML, together with their templates.
There hasn't been much communication between the team members, but I think we've all been busy.
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#138535 - rhaleblian - Sat Aug 25, 2007 6:44 am
hello - i saw a project 'Flip' registered on SourceForge and guess this thread is re: one and the same. I've been running into the admin for that project on IM but we basically miss each other every time.
I wanted to point him to dslibris, which was my attempt to provide myself with a book reading alternative to using Microsoft Reader on CE for non-DRM books.
I don't know where you are with what you're doing, and what it is, but there may be useful things to share.
http://forum.dev-scene.com/viewtopic.php?t=347
features:
* reads XHTML (via expat) and reflows text
* rudimentary support for UTF-8
* provides simple browser for all XHTML found on media root
* saves each book location in .bkm file
* antialiased, proportional text
some design decisions need some rethinking.
also there's a posting for ReadMore Alpha here that appears to have died - know anything about that?
Last edited by rhaleblian on Tue Sep 04, 2007 7:42 am; edited 1 time in total
#138536 - rhaleblian - Sat Aug 25, 2007 6:45 am
oh - haha - Vich must be Keh VH! hello there again.
* supports TrueType and theoretically OpenType fonts. however my focus in not on providing a variety of font choices, rather providing a single solid solution for the DS form factor.
#138546 - jerbob92 - Sat Aug 25, 2007 9:53 am
Oh-yeah Oh-yeah I'm Dutch, I'm Dutch!
I'm able to cooperate, i really can't code, well i can't but only Pawn(a C based coding language) i can help as graphic artist but since you are one yourself you probably don't need one! Well if i can help you give me a shout or add me on msn: j_bobbeldijk [at] hotmail [dot] com
And... the link of the PDF is broken!
Hallo allemaal groetjes uit Venendaal XD
#138606 - Vich - Sun Aug 26, 2007 2:24 pm
At the moment, development has stalled. The various team members all seem to be occupied with their own specific things at the moment. I haven't spoken with Alfatreze yet(for more than a brief moment), but afaik the project is on pause for a while.
jerbob92:
Thanks for the offer, but one graphics artist is enough for this project. I'll definitely remember your post if I need your help.
Groeten uit Overveen :)
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#139289 - rhaleblian - Tue Sep 04, 2007 7:55 am
#145413 - spinal_cord - Thu Nov 15, 2007 2:35 am
Is this project still alive?
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