Currently, what you can do to change the look of the menu is: change the font, change the foreground/background colours, place a backdrop. I think that all these are more than enough for the text based menu (and browser) that Rockbox has.
Now, the next step for that, would probably be to have an option to switch between text based and icon based menu and/or browser. A theme system would exist to change the graphics for all these, and in addition the status bar could be customized as well.
Of course, all these in theory… Cause in practice, for such thing to be implemented, there would be some serious problems to overcome.
1. Booting time: The graphics would require some time to get preloaded. This can take ages sometimes, especially if we are talking about a hard drive player (that may also be fragmented). A solution to that would be to store the graphics in a packaged .tar file. AFAIK, this is planned for the wps files but not yet implemented.
2. Menu responsiveness: A very crucial factor IMO. The code should be implemented wisely enough so the menus won’t be laggy. Clearly, not an easy task for such an undertaking, especially if you take into account that currently some targets (iPods) after the new scheduler implementation deal such problems even with the text based menu.
3. Code complexity: I don’t think that the devs would be very happy about this. Again, the code should be very wise and as simple as possible.
4. Resource handling: An icon based menu would keep the CPU busy more often and require some more buffer for the graphics. At least this should be the case only when the user selects to have an icon based menu.
Anyway, I think for all these reasons that this would be a very hard task to achieve and I wouldn’t hold my breath for it. Personally, even if we ever have icon based menus in the future, I will probably stick to text based menus. Sometimes having things simple is the best way…
Rockbox Technical Forums
Topic: Menu idea - WPS Like System (Read 1892 times)