Beyonwiz Australia

Hi there,

Are there any developers out there who'd be interested in trying to reskin the DP2 UI?

I'm a graphic designer who has been designing interfaces for websites and software for over 10 years. I suck at coding so I'd need a developer who can pull apart the firmware, send me a list of assets for me to redesign, and put it back together again. Who knows, Beyonwiz themselves may even like it!

Every time I fire up my wiz, there is a little part of me that can't stand that awful interface design.

Drop me a line at joe (at) croops.com if you're keen.

Hi Croops,

The bulk of the UI is hard coded into the programming of the firmware. It is most unlikely that much information can be extracted to be refined and then reinserted into the firmware. For example, many elements are not loaded from graphical image files but are drawn programatically.

If you feel motivated to improve the UI then why don't you look at producing some sample screen mock-ups to show how the UI can be improved. (I used to have a Website with mock-ups to promote Beyonwiz UI improvements to my fellow beta testers. Unfortunately I have recently changed ISPs and that website is gone. I may try to resurrect it with my new ISP.)

Regards,
Ian.

IanSav wrote:...
The bulk of the UI is hard coded into the programming of the firmware. It is most unlikely that much information can be extracted to be refined and then reinserted into the firmware. For example, many elements are not loaded from graphical image files but are drawn programatically.
...

It might be instructive for croops to have a look at the icon set in the firmware. The modifiable icons are in /flash/wizdvp/guidata/bitmaps/wiz/total_image on the running Beyonwiz, and they can be opened and repacked into a firmware module reasonably easily using BWFWtools.

The image for the background is in Main-image-2.png, and there are some notes about how it is coloured by the GUI code in the documentation for the BWFWTools Beyonwiz::Hack::BackgroundChanger module that's intended for use with bw_patcher. Some of the icons may be coloured similarly. The smooth shade gradients in Main-image-2.png make it compress pretty poorly as a PNG.

However, as IanSav says, what can actually be done in the GUI is pretty much limited to modifications to these icons, and it may be fairly inflexible about changes to the icon sizes. "Re-skinning" is probably a bit optimistic as a description of what can actually be changed.

It's unclear whether changing strings in /flash/wizdvp/guidata/strtable.txt will change anything in the GUI. The GUI code doesn't seem to reference it.

But good luck!

Hi,

My new ISP (TPG) doesn't support Perl or PHP for the free user webspace! I can't run the UI simulator with this ISP. Sorry.

Regards,
Ian.