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Yesterday night, I merged in a branch I was working on for poorlad's menu. A version of that beautiful menu is now in Git. His menu included a version string at the bottom. We didn't have any way to keep track of versions and builds before, so this was actually a good idea that I had to implement. Because I didn't want to implement support for non-fixed width fonts, or add another space-consuming font, I just used the console font I was already using for that part. I also had to brighten the gradient on the bottom of the screen, since it was basically invisible due to gamma issues otherwise.

The border between the gradient and the "black" is clearly visible on my device. This is probably because of a gamma issue. When poorlad comes back, we can ask him to calibrate it more.

Otherwise, it looks pretty good! In order to make this possible, I added in stb_images.c, a great tiny little image library that can read PNG, JPEGs and even PSD files and does zlib decompression as an added bonus. This will be a great help if we decide to change things or need to add more stuff that consumes a lot of space. I also added in a basic function to perform alpha blending (albeit comparatively slowly).

Sadly, while I was busy making these changes, ius from IRC actually begun to implement poorlad's menu without me knowing about it, so we ened up duplicating each other's efforts. He was able to compile in zlib and libpng, but the cost was to inflate the final binary to 347 KB. Whereas taking out the old menu images, and adding small, compressed PNGs and the stb_images library instead actually made openiboot smaller than it was before! His decision to preblend the images, rather than attempt alpha blending on the device, was probably more optimal from a performance perspective.

Steven Troughton-Smith told me on Twitter that he has actually implemented his own boot menu as well. I'm not sure if he used the new PNG code or not, but the new code makes it pretty easy for a competent programmer to add in whatever menu they would like. I'd tell everyone to skin away, but we should keep as few wild branches of this project as possible, since everyone randomly installing openiboot just for kicks (especially a modified version) and then coming to us (read: me, ultimately) for support is something we don't have the resources to handle at this moment.

On the porting side, the issues with installation, optimizing NOR access on iPhone 3G, NAND access on a few devices all seem to have been fixed, so we can basically scratch the first two items off of the list I put up in the last post. I'm pleasantly surprised at how relatively easy it was.

Anyway, now for the kernel. Well, if I don't get distracted by writing to NAND.