My original goal was to release Mini Micro this summer — ideally, early summer. But it's September now and I haven't managed that. So, in this thread I'm going to give a report of what's going on and how things are going.
Mini Micro 1.0 is oh-so-close to complete, and has mostly been waiting on two things:
- Completion of the Learn to Code in 30 Days book manuscript. Why? Because writing this has turned out to be a great way to make me examine every aspect of Mini Micro's APIs and other functionality, particularly with a beginner's perspective. That has resulted in several small bug fixes and improvements, and so is totally worth it.
- I want to finish the fatbits demo/utility program in /sys/demo. This is a pixel painting program, which is important to include since almost every Mini Micro user will need one. Sure, you can use an external pixel editor, but that's a little awkward when your user disk is a compressed file (which is the default). And we include a code editor; it seems incomplete to not include a pixel editor too.
The book manuscript is getting really close to complete; I'm working on chapter 25 (of 30) right now. So what's the status on fatbits? It is partially functional, and currently looks like this:
Most of the tools actually work. But still on the to-do list:
- That big empty space at top left should be a palette of colors, with some buttons for selecting among different standard palettes.
- The Eraser, Paintbrush, Line, Frame Rect, and Frame Ellipse tools need a slider to control the pen size. (This will go between the tools and the symmetry buttons.)
- When mousing over the paint area with these tools, we need some sort of preview or highlight to show the pen size.
- Undo/Redo support.
- Selection and Blur tools need to be implemented (including cut/copy/paste support).
- Move tool has some problems.
- That big empty space at bottom right should be a preview area, showing your sprite at 1X size, with options for background color and tiling.
- I want to add mode buttons that let me lock any of the red, green, blue, and alpha channels.
- At the top of the screen will be tabs that let you switch between several open files, and a "home" tab with buttons for opening or creating a file. This should also allow you to edit just part of a larger image file (for when you're editing a sprite sheet or tile sheet).
...And I think that's about it. Not too bad, really. It's going to be probably the most sophisticated app in all of /sys/demo, and one of the most useful too (unless you already have a pixel editor you love).
Finally, I'm also taking a careful look at the built-in resources, especially in /sys/pics. I want to be sure there's enough there to support quite a variety of games and programs right out of the box, but I also want them to be consistently high quality. The current selection is decent, but maybe there are still some gaps.
So that's the status! I'll append to this thread with updates as things develop, and keep working hard to get version 1.0 out the door as soon as I can.
