Devlog #8

Ok, so this is the FIRST devlog after the ship. Not really happy about how the ship went but oh well. Anyway, so, I added stuff:

• A Settings App
• Upgrades to the UI
• Worked on a sort of dictionary for all the new stuff that I’m introducing (after all, it is CometOS)

The Settings App:

Ok, so one of the major themes in the feedback I got was there needed to be more apps (since its an OS). So, I added a settings app, as just a basic, customization app. So, you can change the background image, and there’s a bit of design choices as well. I kept it so you need to scroll down to see all the images (some people won’t agree with this, but personally, I really like it. The scrolling feels more interactive and is required for a window size that looks really, really good). Also, the borders of the buttons turn blue when selected, and there obviously also a shadow indication that its a button when you hover over it.

UI changes:

So this was actually pretty small but looked really cool. I’ve seen on some sites there are just these little elements that blur the background behind them. While I was tinkering with css for the button shading I realized there was a style of filter: blur(). From there I found out about backdrop-filter: blur() and used that in the CometOS welcome window and the top and bottom bars.

The dictionary app (name needs workshopping)

So this is basically just because CometOS is about a fictional character in a fantasy world, so there needed to be an app that dealt with some words and terms used in other partts of the website (specifically the family tree). I felt there needed to be something to explain it, so, I added this. Its not done, so far I’m just done with one of the Relseiðr pages. Currently this is just hidden with display: none so I can work on functionality first.

Challenges:

There were really only a few challenges this time. The largest one was actually just getting the seperate visual cues which go (oh, this is interactive!) for the button and the image inside. Because I kept accidentally giving the button’s new classList to the image. And thats when I realized event.target and event.currentTarget were different and made for this…..

On a side note, omg, display: inline-flex is so helpful!

What I’ll work on next:

I have now realized that since I’m adding so many apps, I need to add proper, adaptive view bounds. Before this I was using local pixel-specific bounds which were adapted to my viewport, and just not putting it on github, because I had already put in the work for those view bounds a few months ago, and it worked really well for me.

So, anyway, I have now decided I need proper view bounds, so definitely going to work on that.

Also, heres the new Settings app, and the beginning of the dictionary app.