At this blog you will be able to follow the development of Costa. Every now and then I will post about the current status of the project, tell news about Costa, and talk a little about future goals. Atom feed is available, for those who want to keep posted.
Since its inception in 2004, Costa has always used VGA graphics. More specifically, it used the standard VGA 640x480 pixels resolution, with 16 colors. I chose this resolution, because I liked the relatively sharp graphics it can produce, and the amount of screen real estate it provides. But, this graphics mode has a couple of drawbacks.
Work on optimizing Costa continues. Some time ago, I wrote about how all image and config files were replaced with binary files, rather than the human-readable formats they were in. This had a couple of advantages in regard to speed.
Just in time before the new year, Costa version 1.5.0 has finished testing and has been released. This version comes with many improvements and changes, but three stand out from the rest: A new UI design based on Costa 0.9.4, massive speed improvements to handling of data files, and full keyboard support in all accessories. Code optimizations have also helped reduced the combined size of Costas executables significantly.
With all the recent changes to Costa, namely the changes to all file formats, came the opportunity to really go through the code and try to make sure all file related errors are handled properly.
It’s been a while since there’s been news on the development of Costa. But the last couple of days have yielded some newsworthy developments.
Firstly, the entire UI code - that is, the code that draws windows, buttons etc. - has been rewritten.
