We would like to welcome you all to DS-X Blogs. Our new product, DS-Xtreme, is unique and revolutionary in many ways and will completely transform the industry as it exists in its current form. With our own dedicated OS running natively on the DS the possibilities for features and development are endless. With countless hours of solid development behind it, the DS-Xtreme is now ready to be handed over to you, the public, to enjoy, build up, and develop together with our dedicated technical unit. The creation of this blog is for precisely that purpose. It is our hope that it will become an informal meeting and discussion place for us to communicate our thoughts, ideas, new developments and of course to get input and ideas from all of you. Since our OS is a living and breathing entity, we feel that it will be co-developed and worked on together with you. We have many features that we ourselves would love to incorporate into our custom OS, and we are sure that with the “opening up” of this device to the huge and active homebrew and open source development community, our product will grow and evolve without limitation. The possibilities are endless.

Although the product will be released with the bare essentials in place, (which already far outstrip anything else out there), the framework and base are there for tailor-made features and applications, which we will be incorporating into the device as and when they are ready. We have worked very hard to ensure that this product (as well as all our other future planned products) are not only fool proof in design and concept but also upgradeable and flexible enough to grow and develop into completely unique and fully customiseable devices.

Welcome to the DS-Xtreme. Welcome to the future!

A lot of folks have asked about the skinability ( is that a word? ) of the UI. It's a good question, and the answer is easy:

The UI is very very skinnable

One thing we've tried very hard to keep in mind during development is that ultimately, what you (the end users) want is the most important thing, and that releasing a product which isn't flexible enough to be customized to suit your desires just wouldn't be fair to you. So we have designed the skinning engine to allow for customization of everything we could think of, from images, to layout, to effects, to workflow etc.. We like to think of it not so much as a skinning engine, but more as a full UI development framework and widget toolkit. That doesn't really roll off the tongue however, so we'll stick to "skinning engine" for now :)

In the coming days, we'll get more technical information out to you guys about how it all works, so all you experienced skinners, and skinners-to-be out there can start to think about what sorts of cool things you'd like to do with it. We've been trying to think of some ways to get everyone involved and the idea of having some skinning competitions came up. I'd like to open up this topic for feedback, so if you think it would be worthwhile please speak up :)

Peace,
Leto
Lead Software Engineer