User:Ifletcher/Uniity (Ui Toolkit)

Well, in hope that more people read that and respond to it in the discussion as in the forums I posted my idea of Uniity here. I really hope someone is interested in that, I am NOT developing this library at the moment but I hope there will be someone who could work with me on that!

The Idea...

...is to create a kind of Ui Toolkit with different graphical components and some usable functions to make the Interfacedesign on our console a little bit more easy and prettier! The most wii homebrew just doesn't look well (exception: homebrew channel)! The Menus are always using different controls and everything looks different on that's sometimes really making me crazy and I think many people (mostly newbies) are confused by that!

I guess you're asking yourself why I don't do that myself, simply, because I can't program, but I can design controls and components!

What it should contain?

The toolkit should contain components (e.g. buttons, textboxes) which are working great with all controllers the wii can use and of course, this should be really usable with all these controllers and just use the capabilities of the wii! That's why I think some of the components will be really different from what you know from your computer! As an examples let's take Listboxes! Well, actually, it really sucks to have a wiimote with motion sensor and so on but still you have to press buttons to scroll down a menu? There are much better ways to make listboxes on the, so instead of pressing buttons to scroll, you just drag the whole list to the top to scroll down and the movement scrolls slowly out. Some people may have noticed that this is totally inspired by the iPhone, and the iPhone is a really good point to start designing components for the wii, because the movements are actually the same, but instead of doing it with one finger like on the iphone, you use your hand with wiimote! And of course, there's no multi-touch for the wii! Further, this toolkit contains many standard components which are also used on the PC, but mostly just adapted to the wii's own features! Well, it should also contain an OnScreen Keyboard which automatically open when you click on a textfield, but I think we could use libosk for that!

List of Controls which could be in the toolkit

Button (Actually, just like a standard button on every PC)
Labels (A Way to display plain text
Lists (only text/text with image)
Pop-Up Menu (not sure if it's usable on the wii)
Small Message Windows to show e.g. hints
Checkboxes, Radioboxes
Tab Controls (could be probably very similar)
Toolbar
Image component
TextField (to write text)

Most of these look of course like on the PC, but for some of the Controls I could imagine some better ways on the Wii!

General Components that would be useful

OnScreen Keyboard - maybe a modified version of libosk
-menu, like when you press in a Wii Game, idea by Navarr¹:

[ Home Menu (H) Close ]
[ Loader ]    [ Reset ]
[ Wii Remote Settings ]

¹ - I suggest instead of "Wii Remote Settings" we include something else, I'm not sure if this entry is really needed!

Mock-Ups

I will post mockups later if there will be interested people who could make that, so i make them for SOMEthing not for NOThing!

Why all that stress?

Programmers should have it easier to make UIs
Give the users better UIs
Make the homebrew scene a little bit cooler and do something good, I think such a project has a future and will be used by programmers always once it's done