This is a neat idea, and I'll likely need an error screen like that eventually.

Frederik made a program like this a while ago, called Designer, which I think does what you're describing. The issue in my case is that due to the way the palette is laid out, I don't have enough space to do a gradient effect like that (I'm using 8bpp mode, meaning only 256 colors can be on the screen at a time). The color picker definitely will need a rework at some point though, as I'm not really happy with how it currently functions and looks.

Ok so, I love the shell but, some functions are quite hard to work like scrolling through programs. Overall it works very well.

Not quite sure what you're saying here, but thanks! And scrolling through the programs is actually quite easy, all you have to do is hit the arrow keys or [+] and [-] while hovering over the menu, depending on what cursor mode you're in.

Oh I'm sorry that's not included in the documentation

Interesting, I thought it was. What version of the shell are you using? VYSION 2's pre-releases have only been privately available thus far, so I assume VYSION 1?

EDIT: Looks like you're right, the [+] and [-] keys being used for scrolling in the cursor-based mode in VYSION 1 was not included in the readme. Sorry about that!

Yes I think so

0.1.5

Introduction
As I haven't posted an update for a while now, here's another one. I somehow have only moved to 0.1.5, despite making a lot of big changes this update. The largest new features for this update are a new start menu, improved file explorer, and file/folder creation and deletion.

Start menu
The start menu now has a slick new design that is more usable, including a file explorer right in the start menu, so it's possible to launch programs without having to waste too many unnecessary keypresses. You can also search for programs here, as well as being able to open windows as you could before (still needs a scroll bar though, which will be added very soon, just haven't got around to it yet).


File explorer
I've done some reworking of the dividers and scroll bars, and now they can be included in the file explorer, which makes everything more usable and functional. Additionally, you can now create and delete files and folders from the file explorer.


Conclusion
Thanks for reading! I still have a fair amount of bugs to iron out before the next pre-release, which will be, as always, rolled out to testers on my Discord server in due time. Stay tuned for more updates in the weeks to come.

Changelog
[added] file deletion
[added] file creation
[added] folder creation
[added] start menu search box
[added] start menu file explorer menu
[improved] start menu design
[improved] dividers and scroll bars can now be added to windows
[fixed] snapping right could result in incorrect size
[fixed] pressing exit to exit could rerun VYSION 2 when returning to TIOS
[fixed] incorrect transparency on some icons

Nice, you upgraded to the windows XP start menu

Yep, it definitely does look somewhat like that, in terms of the two-columned layout with the programs on the left and some actions on the right. I was going more for a Windows 7 kind of look though, with the programs, search box, and windows on the right with an icon indicating the one currently hovered over in the top right (the icon doesn't change yet, but it will soon).

Good work so far! Will Vysion 2 have a way to program windowed apps?

Is the second version up for public download yet? I am very interested in having it on my calculator.

Also, I don't have any idea how you would do this unless I'm mistaken about the powers of C, but it would be really cool if you could make it so Vysion could "run" multiple programs simultaneously, and be able to define windows. Maybe you could do it by making a program that builds Vysion with assembly of some programs? Or it could just be that it has some "apps" built into it, like a text editor or a sprite/tilemap editor, unless that's kind of what you already have. Or there could be an app for creating the background, or embed Terminal CE, again, if that's possible.

Early operating systems like Windows 2, Mac OS 5, or GEM had the ability to multitask a sort of desktop widget that was specifically designed for the purpose. You could do that here, but not programs that aren't built for the purpose, both because most programs don't share their RAM with anything and would cause a horrible crash with another program, and because the CPU isn't made to run multiple tasks at once - it could be forced to like KnightOS does, but it would be painfully slow.

If you're thinking you could pretend to multitask by bringing a window into focus, then when you switch to another window it takes the whole program and copies it's RAM into the archive so the unfocused program is visible but not in use, early versions of Mac OS did that too, but it will be horribly slow without a safe way to share the RAM - and we don't have much RAM to share.

As Jinnai roughly stated, having it run multiple programs simultaneously isn't really viable, as it would run into those RAM issues, as well as running into issues with support with programs that aren't made to work that way. I have given this issue some thought though, as I would like people to be able to make apps for VYSION 2 if it's something that there's demand for (which apparently there is). I envisioned that it would work as S/jr/W described above, where you'd be able to build a copy of VYSION 2 with the built-in apps that you want using some kind of utility, probably written in Python.


It is not, I'm still working on getting everything ready via testing phases, and I'll share more information when I have it about a potential public beta and of course, the full release as well.

Thanks to everyone for your questions and feedback! Remember to post more if you have them, and stay tuned for more updates.

Does the new beta release have the mouse move concurrent with real time? If not I strongly suggest this, even as just an option. Great work! I'm excited to see how this project develops.

Yep, it's framerate-independent, moving based on the fractional number of seconds elapsed since the last frame.

And thanks! Looking forward to sharing more updates soon.

As a bit of an odd question, will there be a way to create apps meant to run within Vysion? I know that's kinda weird and niche, but you were working on a way for hexadit and Vysion 1 to work together (I can't remember if you finished or not but I saw some SAX chat about it ages ago), so theoretically it'd be neat to have little windowed "apps" you could run for some functions. Besides some diagnostic tools or file managers (VAPOR?) I can't think of anything really crazy besides porting Oneshot. It's coming along great and I'm excited for the first official release!

Things I would like to see Vysion 2 have "native" support for:

HexaEdit (or some lightweight variant)
prgmNOTES, perhaps even a Markdown interpreter.
CEsh or some other ANSI terminal that can run scripts (like .bat on Windows)
A big, customizable clock (maybe even be able to set it as the desktop background?)
Not likely, but maybe put some sort of dumb easter-egg game in, like flappy calc (or floppy bard -- remember that one?) that takes a certain key combo to run (like, say, I don't know, maybe [6],[^2],[whatever is below del]?)

This is all I can think of for now. Expect more unrealistic ideas in the near future!

Keep up the good work Epsilon, you're venturing into completely new frontiers at this point. While more features are always a good thing, what kind of onboard file space will the new Vysion 2 be taking up in comparison to the original?

For the reasons discussed earlier, this would be difficult to do as it would almost certainly involve keeping VYSION in RAM while having another program loaded in as well, which would have to be specially made for that purpose and would take a lot of work to get working. My current plan was to have a script that could be used to make a custom copy of VYSION with some desired "modules," which could be made by either myself or others. And those are neat ideas darkwater, I'll make a note of all of them.

HexaEdit support is also something that I'm still interested in and will be messing around with at some point in the future.


Thanks! And as for the file sizes, here are some rough estimates for everything (I'm comparing VYSION 1.0.0 to VYSION 2 0.1.8, VYSION 2's sizes are subject to change with future updates). This is on my personal calc, with 38 programs and 135 appvars.

Main program
VYSION 1 29958 bytes
VYSION 2 33457 bytes
Again, this will be subject to change, particularly as VYSION 2 is incomplete. I'd expect the first release to be 40-45k, but given that that's barely larger than a single wallpaper for the shell, it doesn't really matter as far as I'm concerned. The vastly improved and expanded feature set also is something to consider here.

---

Filesystem appvar
VYSION 1 4560 bytes
VYSION 2 82 bytes
This is for a filesystem that's completely left in its default state--VYSION 1 needs 20 bytes to create a new folder and 0 bytes to add a file to a folder (although it doesn't allow copying), and VYSION 2 needs 11 bytes to create a folder, and 10 bytes to add a file to a folder. However, in VYSION 2 the filesystem is separate from the current list of programs on the calculator, which significantly reduces the size of the appvar. VYSION 1's filesystem also expands as programs are added to the calculator, which isn't needed in VYSION 2 and will make that difference larger the more files are on the calculator. I estimate that in most use cases, VYSION 2's filesystem will take less than 2% of the size of the original's, unless you're creating tons of copies of files (which, keep in mind, wasn't even possible in the old filesystem).

---

Data appvar
VYSION 1 78 bytes
VYSION 2 105 bytes
VYSION 2's is bigger here, simply because of its new features and the fact that the colors are now 16bpp rather than 8bpp.

---

Hook appvar
VYSION 1 NA
VYSION 2 154 bytes
This didn't exist in VYSION 1, so it's only a concern in VYSION 2.

---

Wallpapers
This is all up to compression, so I can't give any exact figures here, but given that VYSION 2's wallpapers have an embedded palette and are 320x240 compared to 160x120, they will be significantly larger.

I hope this answered your question adequately. The filesystem appvar is probably the one to worry about the most, as it's something that was constantly being archived and unarchived in VYSION 1, and as such resulted in very frequent garbage collects which will be much rarer in VYSION 2. If you have a decent amount of archive space you won't need to worry about this program.