No beta updates for almost two months? Is it dead?
No. But things are taking longer than anticipated... unsurprisingly.
After the release of v.2.5, I've started to actually work on the long promised UI revamp. But ripping out most of the existing interface and replacing it with something that is hopefully at least a bit better turns out to be no small task after all.
Initially I intended to reveal all changes at once as one big announcement, but with so much time passing, I might as well show what I do have so far.
I'll not be going into much about what is planned for what will become Desktop+ 3.0, rather than talking about what is actually already implemented and working on my end. My plans aren't fixed anyways. Things can and will change over time.
New Color Scheme
The future is bright...er. Overall not a terribly massive change, but leads to a slightly cleaner look.
Buttons are also a bit rounded now. There is a slight loss of contrast compared to the black background color, but I think it looks nicer this way.
Translation Support
No more hard-coded text. Though as of right now it's really just support for translations, rather than actual translations. I can only really provide English and German myself, so I plan to rely on the community for additional languages.
Fully Custom Keyboard
This one was going to happen eventually anyways, so it's already implemented.
Layouts and keyboard behavior can configured as needed. Keyboard window can be dragged around and resized too. Pinning keeps it around in-game if needed.
Additional layouts can be added by the user, but there's a little bit of fiddling required (as in, no graphical editor for layouts). If you want a certain keyboard layout to be included by default, feel free to leave a comment.
Alternative input methods, dictionary support... are things that make sense, but won't ship with 3.0.
Overlay Bar
The new way to manage overlays. Pretty much just a fancier way to the same tasks as before, but with new overlay creation focusing on starting fresh from a source selection, rather than duplicating another overlay (still available).
This will actually not be the only way to create overlays. But I'm not ready to talk about that yet.
Sounds pretty alright so far, doesn't it? So where's the preview build?
As said at the start, I pretty much ripped most of the UI out. This means most features of Desktop+ are currently inaccessible, resulting in something of little practical use right now.
Preview builds will be available when the most important settings are implemented again.
As I develop Desktop+ in my spare time, things will probably still take a while. Thank you for your patience.