Hi everyone,
Last year, in January, I decided to have some fun and write a homebrew application using the EFL libraries. I decided to work on a homebrew manager.. basically a replacement to the XMB. It went really well, and the development was really fast, and it was all thanks to the awesome API and capabilities of the EFL libraries. However, I became busy and was unable to continue… also, it was a bit slow and without proper hardware acceleration, it wouldn’t be as good as I hoped for, so I put the project on the side.
After many months, in September, thanks to gzorin’s work, we finally had a working and usable GL implementation and the EFL apps automatically gained from it by becoming hardware accelerated. My homebrew manager was much better! but I still needed to finish a few things and I didn’t have time so I put to rest again.
Today, I have decided to release this homebrew application, *as is* for everyone’s enjoyment! This means that it is not fully working, it might still have some bugs here and there, but it is still a homebrew app that people can use and have some fun with. Most importantly it will serve 4 purposes:
- Maybe re-awaken this dying PS3 homebrew scene
- Be a good “exercise to the community” for finishing it up
- Be a good example of what can be done with the EFL
- Bring non-developers into writing EFL themes for the app
I introduce to you, Eleganz! The Elegant Homebrew Manager! A little homebrew app that lets you install pkg files and run your games directly from it. Here is the mandatory screencast video: (See below)
I have published my app in both github and on ps3dev’s gitorious. and you can also download a pre-compiled .pkg for your PS3 to have fun with it.
Here are some highglights of the application (features, limitations and bugs):
- The whole User Interface is completely customizable with themes
- Installs .pkg files locally to its own data directory (won’t be visible in the real XMB, unless someone reverses the database format)
- Does not yet run games (it’s for you to do it, use ps3load as reference maybe…)
- Current theme is missing proper theme/images for the progressbar windows (default exquisite/E17 theme used)
- System freezes for a few milliseconds when it tries to load a game’s background image (might be fixed if we implement a pthread library and threading support in the EFL)
- Apparently crashes when it exits (bug)