Hi everyone,

Last year, in January, I decided to have some fun and write a homebrew application using the EFL libraries. I decided to work on a homebrew manager.. basically a replacement to the XMB. It went really well, and the development was really fast, and it was all thanks to the awesome API and capabilities of the EFL libraries. However, I became busy and was unable to continue… also, it was a bit slow and without proper hardware acceleration, it wouldn’t be as good as I hoped for, so I put the project on the side.
After many months, in September, thanks to gzorin’s work, we finally had a working and usable GL implementation and the EFL apps automatically gained from it by becoming hardware accelerated. My homebrew manager was much better! but I still needed to finish a few things and I didn’t have time so I put to rest again.

Today, I have decided to release this homebrew application, *as is* for everyone’s enjoyment! This means that it is not fully working, it might still have some bugs here and there, but it is still a homebrew app that people can use and have some fun with. Most importantly it will serve 4 purposes :

• Maybe re-awaken  this dying PS3 homebrew scene
• Be a good “exercise to the community” for finishing it up
• Be a good example of what can be done with the EFL
• Bring non-developers into writing EFL themes for the app

I introduce to you, Eleganz! The Elegant Homebrew Manager! A little homebrew app that lets you install pkg files and run your games directly from it. Here is the mandatory screencast video :

YouTube Link toEleganz screencast

I have published my app in both github and on ps3dev’s gitorious. and you can also download a pre-compiled .pkg for your PS3 to have fun with it.

Here are some highglights of the application (features, limitations and bugs) :

• The whole User Interface is completely customizable with themes
• Installs .pkg files locally to its own data directory (won’t be visible in the real XMB, unless someone reverses the database format)
• Does not yet run games (it’s for you to do it, use ps3load as reference maybe…)
• Current theme is missing proper theme/images for the progressbar windows (default exquisite/E17 theme used)
• System freezes for a few milliseconds when it tries to load a game’s background image (might be fixed if we implement a pthread library and threading support in the EFL)
• Apparently crashes when it exits (bug)

The homebrew app comes with two themes, a dark and light theme. I like the dark one so I chose that as the default (oh, ignore that grey background ‘default’ one from that screencast video, that was just for testing). I wrote the user interface for the theme (the Edje files) while opium designed all the graphics. The theme engine in the EFL is extremely powerful, so I hope I will see tons of themes popping up. And I do not mean “change the images” themes, I want real themes, where the whole UI is different, a vertical XMB, a circular one, a 3D theme with perspective/depth for the icons, a dynamic/moving background, etc… You can learn about the .edj/.edc file format here and don’t forget to check the EDC reference wiki.

I hope to see the community pick this up and have fun with it!

That’s about it, enjoy it, and send me your patches! I’ll be waiting 🙂

KaKaRoTo

p.s: Forgot to say that the rules/naming conventions/etc.. of the EDC files are explained here. If a .edj file doesn’t have the appropriate parts/groups, then it will be ignored and will not show on the UI.

p.p.s: You can install the EFL on windows and have access to edje_cc to compile your .edc into .edj.

p.p.p.s: Damn, I  keep forgetting stuff.. by the way, the whole Eleganz application works just fine on the PC too, I did all my development on the PC (that screencast was actually on Linux), *then* I tried it on the PS3 and it just worked.. so for theme development, it should be pretty easy to test without the need of a PS3.