hiei03 and sonic master performs a new version of their shell for the DS, "X-Soft" including multiple applications including Paint, an audio player, notepad, etc ... that goes to version 5.

Quote:
Version 5.0
IMPROVEMENTS:
* Gum and color In the Paint program.
* Thickness of the stylus to draw in Paint, press R to increase the area and reduce L, you can see the increase in details above.
* You can select all the programs start.
* Now you can put whatever you type in a notepad txt and you can change the color of the letter with the right and left arrows.
* Added the map of Andalusia, and you can view a gif that you want in a new option is called "the map".
* You can play any song in the folder Xsoft / data / sfx. My pc can find the settings for the application you can choose whether you want to see the mouse, if you want to put the merits of fat or not, or in a Windows environment, soft-X or Linux.
* You can change money just by changing the file Xsoft bin / data / bg image and convert the others.

I've always been pretty impressed with the Sony PSP overall; brilliant screen, some good gaming options, music and video playing, and even a crappy yet capable web browser. Still, Sony (like Apple and a million other companies) likes to mess with its customers and so to really get the full value of your purchase you have to 'unlock' the device - imagine buying a car that can only fill half a tank of gas except on Fridays, where all you have to do is fiddle with this warranty removing knob to get the full deal. Anyway, planning for a short trip I have been mulling over what gadgetry would be good to bring along.

Ideally I won't need a gadget at all, but should like some options if I find myself bored with a napping baby. You could try for a micro-laptop such as a 'netbook' or UMPC but they tend to be pretty expensive (you'd cry if it were lost, stolen or crushed in transit) and too large for a pocket; a PDA which can excel at internet communications, ebook and multimedia, but tends not to be a solid game machine for long trips; a smartphone, should you wisk to have people bothering you on your vacation. Options options.

Anyway, for a short non-working trip, the things I'd like the option to do are: ebook reading (avoid carrying cumbersome and heavy books), video watching (from video files, not internet streams), some gaming, and idle web browsing. I'm not worried about email or heavy duty activities in this case. (Should you need to do email or document edittig or whatever, then you may want a netbook or whatever.)

Rearding ebooks, I'm not going to go on a tirade about DRM and locked up data and cost versus real hardcover books and so on - I've probably ranted about that before. Suffice to say I only use open formats such as RTF and HTML and textfiles; for the PSP there are few book reader options and no time for me to write a new one so I fretted a touch, though I eventually found the most excellent BookR open source app. Because it is not Sony-blessed you'll need an unlocked PSP (free and legal, if frowned upon by corporate masters.) This is what I meant above -- if theres no sensible book reader, they shouldn't be locking down a perfectly capable device. Likewise with video -- the built in video tools only let you watch low res video except for Sony UMD bought videos. Thats just evil in my opinion -- artificial limits to encourage you to buy their products.. a clear conflict of interest. Anyway I'll go on about that later in this post.

There are some really goofy attempts to do things on the level, such as an app that reads ebooks and spits out a million image files (multiple images per book page) and you use the PSP built in picture viewer to 'read' the book; you thus don't get a memory of which page you've read to, but it sort of works. BookR is a PDF reader - which provided some reservations up front as most ebooks you get in PDF format are DRM'd to heck - but with PDF now being more or less an open format numerous converters now exist. I used the OpenOffice export-to-PDF option to convert RTF files to PDF, and good to go. I don't know if the application can render 'big' PDFs with charts and embedded crazyness but when it came to various ebooks I've bought in unDRMd format or ones I converted myself, it seems to work very well.

Further, with the PSP screen being very high resolution in the landscape orientation (480x272), you can have a full-width comfortable read of most PDFs .. you just have to scroll down the page as you read, no biggy. The application lets you zoom and pan and rotate so you can accomodate most files, but you don't want to do that when reading. If you're converting to PDF yourself you can of course just use a larger font and set the page-width should you wish to make the reading easier on the eyes. All told though, I loaded up a half dozen books onto the memstick, and I think I'll be fine. This is a big one for me, a device-picking deal breaker, so good to know.

For video I thought to bring along some 'rips' of DVDs I own and videos I've downloaded. Sadly, most gadgets require you to 'transcode' a video into a format they can understand. This is pretty annoying, but I appreciate they're doing the playback via built in hardware and thus conserving battery. Doing video playback purely in software is a battery burner, and can be hard to keep up with the full framerate. (Mind you my older Palm and Windows Mobile devices could do it no problem, suggesting the fine TCPMP Core Codec people did good work.) Anyway, I found a bajillion freeware and open source tools to do the work (such as Universal PSP convert, and PSP Video Converter (pspvc), and others), as well as commercial offerings (from Sony and other third parties.) In the end, the freebie guys tend to work pretty well, and sometimes better. The commercial offerings tend to work easier and have better less cheesie UIs, but also tend to conform to the Sony recommended specs. Sony used to (maybe still does?) require video playback to be lower resolution that

A new version of BibleQuiz is released with the following changes:
- Update url on intro screens to www.plaatsoft.nl (My new domain).
- Network thread status is now showed on welcome screen.
- Bugfix: Remove some small reported graphical bugs.
- Bugfix: Highscore is now always loaded correctly.
- Bugfix: Remove several bugs in network thread.
- Build game with libogc 1.7.1 and devkitPPC r16 compiler.

BibleQuiz is an open-source quiz game. Test your knowlegde about the bible. Special thanks to my family for their support during the development of this game.

A new version of RedSquare is released with the following changes:
- Improve and secure webservice interface.
- Bugfix: Remove some small reported graphical bugs.
- Bugfix: Remove several bugs in network thread.
- Build game with libogc 1.7.1 and devkitPPC r16 compiler.

RedSquare is an classic 2D action game. Click and hold the red square. Now, move it so that you neither touch the walls nor get hit by any of the blue blocks. If you make it to 31 seconds, you are doing brilliantly! Special thanks to my family for their support during the development of this game.