Hey guys,
This is my first post, so be gentle!
I love the emulator, and love helping out with issues and reporting bugs as and when I come across them, and would like to play a part in the future development of the app, especially for Mac OSX.
I'm a web/UI designer by trade, and in a lull of work over the weekend, I decided to have a go of revamping the UI of the OSX app, to feature a new look and feel, and more organised way of loading games, and accessing settings etc.
My shots are over at Dribbble (
http://dribbble.com/shots/646714-Dolphin-II) with a full version attached for your viewing pleasure. I'm currently working on other screens and overlays, and will keep you posted on these.
The main question is then, are you open to having the UI for the OSX app re-designed, and if so, would you accept my offer of designing it for you, completely free?
We're definitely open to such propositions but designing alone is not very useful unless you can find someone who wants to implement it. None of the current Dolphin devs use OSX and most of us hate doing UI work so you're probably going to have to look outside of the current dev team
Thanks for the speedy reply!
I know a few developer friends who are quite capable, and I've put a message out to them to see if they're interested. If I can get a gang together, what would be the process to getting things started - downloading the source and altering that?
Man, I'd really hate to be the one that has to collect and manage all that cover artwork. Even the wiki has problems finding it all, and we only have to do it one game at a time.
As for the design, it's definitely nice visually. I really like the mac style personally, and I think they have a great way of doing design. So, *DROOL*. But eh, being a graphics designer myself, all those practical things start to kick in. It's pretty inefficient in its use of space. Sure you could just change it to list view and that's that. But the bar on the left is pretty big. And it allows for sorting of GCN/Wii games, but doesn't allow them all together, and it ignores Wiiware, Virtual Console, and Triforce games. And that "Add Games" button seems kinda silly, I much prefer dolphin's current method to just point it at a directory. And the GCN and Wii icons don't match the iconography of the rest of the UI, makes them a tad jarring.
It is really pretty though. And that's the big thing Dolphin's UI lacks right now, in my opinion. The Dolphin GUI is very easy to use and highly functional (minus some spreading out of config functions), but uh, it could use a facelift.
CFG-Loader is able to download game covers automatically from
GameTDB . It should be possible to have Dolphin do something similar, provided someone is willing to write the necessary code.
That is not exactly ideal. GameTDB is hardly a full selection, and alot of what they have on there is of poor quality. Sure they have some great quality for some stuff and a good selection, but most of the time when I'm looking for a cover, GameTDB does not have it. Of course, most of the "easy" covers are done on the wiki, but still.
for the love of everything beautiful, please don't try to make dolphin look like some stupid warezloader.
maybe check out
http://code.google.com/p/wii-banner-player/ for a better solution.
and what delroth and MaJoR said.
we appreciate anyone's work on any aspect of the emulator, especially if you're new.
however you should know that you can't *just* replace the os x app's gui.
dolphin currently uses wxwidgets and the gui looks the same on all platforms. the same-look-and-code-across-all-platforms aspect is something I really want to keep, although it doesn't necessarily have to be built on wxwidgets.
well, good luck
Well I don't remember, but isn't it possible to use dolphin from the command line? If so you could create a seperate program that passes commands to the dolphin app. If that works you could talk to a dev about making it official and included in the source code.