Many people wonder why I'm heading off towards GUI development instead of bittorrent, gnutella and whatever new networks. To be quite honest, the major reason behind that is that a change is needed - I'm pretty fed up with the core development - it's been what? 14 months now? - and QT development is basically like starting from scratch - all prior knowledge is void, except for base C++ knowledge - in QT, you have nearly no use for STL, Boost or whatever API's we'v written for Hydranode, so it's a clean slate to all prior knowledge base - very nice change. Not to mention that I'v started making really stupid mistakes in core coding already, for example a week ago I checked in a 3-line change into PartData w/o proper testing nor looking at the code, which caused a ton of crashes on file completition (fixed now in r1573). This clearly shows that I should stay off the existing, working code for a while.

So, after many hours, I finally managed to get the first Launcher version up and running:

Hydranode Console with Win2K theme
Hydranode Console with WinXP theme
Hydranode Console with WinXP theme (transparent)
Hydranode Console on Linux

Granted, it's still very early version, so much can change, but I figured I'll drop these screenshots, since I haven't been very active on the blog recently ...

Anyway, the Console will have support for at least partial Core/GUI communication, so one can perform most operations directly from it, without launching full GUI. Rationale: several of my testers on win32 have said "oh, this interface [hydranode shell] is so cool, you HAVE to leave it in!" - so Hydranode Console will become a usable command-line interface, with the addition of some nifty features that we cannot possibly do in telnet-based interface (transparency, for example :P).

Madcat, ZzZz