Likelihood of continuing development? Pandafe for Pandora and/or Pyra?

[porg]

@nuhrin How likely is it that you will put some effort into pandafe again?

Especially regarding the upcoming Pyra?

Should someone provide some mockups/clickdummies, uniting some of the features requested in the tracker into an overall user experience concept (possible me), how likely is it that you resume development of Pandafe?

Do you have intents to port Pandafe over to the Pyra? If so, how are the prospects for parallel development of Pandafe for both Pyra and Pandora?

[nuhrin]

Hi porg, sorry for the long silence, I've not been here in ages.

I am reasonably likely to continue in some form at some point, but not likely to invest a ton of time on it. I do have a variety of unfinished and unreleased experiments sitting around in a local backup, and I would like to get those released at least.

I did pre-order a Pyra, not so much for the sake of gaming, but one of my unreleased experiments was getting Pardafe running on the GCW0, so presumably targeting both Pyra and Pandora in future releases is not unrealistic.

One thing that stopped me from doing further releases is that I thought updated documentation would be important, and I just didn't ever make time for that. If you are interested in helping to get a new release out on the Pandora I would be glad to send you a PND of the latest unreleased work in exchange for some testing and updating the documentation.

[porg]

Ping. Did you get a Pyra? Did your continue with some experiments for building for Pandora and Pyra?

[nuhrin]

Hey @porg. Like most, I have not yet received my Pyra. I have not continued with those "unfinished and unreleased experiments", at least not exactly. What I have done, very slowly (work and family permitting), is to port the project to Rust, as a way of both learning Rust and addressing some systemic issues in the codebase (which would have required some rewriting anyway). In theory this will make things easier to maintain/extend over time, but certainly it will keep me interested longer.

I continue to plug away at that rewrite in my spare time, as a hobby, and I expect to eventually push all that work into this repository. Whether or not this happens before I get my Pyra is a sort of running joke for me, but since it will no doubt arrive at my door one day I expect I will eventually make and release something at least minimally usable.

After that sometime future "at least minimally usable" release, I will most likely still keep plugging away at it, for hobby sake. I wonder though if perhaps by now there are several more suitable/capable/usable/etc which could be used for the same purpose on Pyra?

[porg]

1) Thanks for the update! 2) I don't know the contemporary software landscape of the https://OpenPandora.org in general and launcher software in particular. At a certain moment the software/game configuration of my Pandora remained as is, only thing left with it, to really play with it here and then. Only a few times per year that I do video games anyhow. 3) What to me were the unique qualities of Pandafe as a launcher: a) Games and ROMs both as first level citizens. b) Versatile way to sort, browse, filter. c) Very efficient key based navigation and operation. d) Possibility to edit individual categories/tags both per .PND apps/games and ROMs, again being effective for a). 4) Only things over long time usage which I missed a) Battery level indicator: My workaround is to launch one of the games/apps which have one integrated, look it up, and exit again back to the launcher. b) #39 maybe already possible with the current software.

[porg]

Hi @nuhrin , to keep you in good faith I write to you that: 1) despite development being on hold for 10 years, you still get appreciation by users in recent years, e.g. a repo review on 2021-08-07 which reads:

Noticed I've never rated this indispensable piece of software even though I've been using it for years and still my main UI (for gaming). 2) I too still have personal interest in this!

Regards, porg