Hello, I am dhtdht020, I don't know how to change username. Please someone change my username.
I love actively sharing things I do, and when it's about april fools I couldn't do that, so I've decided to post the (pretty short) background and development on this year's osc april fools, the Open Shop Channel Downloader Browser, and give some insight as to why the binary is not publicly available.
I don't think it's very interesting, but there are parts I feel like sharing.
Coming up with the idea:
If you've used OSCDL (Open Shop Channel Downloader), the desktop tool used for sending applications from the Open Shop Channel to the Wii with WiiLoad, you know that when switching between apps on the list, the gui freezes for a fraction of a second until it finishes downloading the icon image. Yes, indeed an unfortunate case of me not bothering to thread it.
So instead of threading it, my first idea was: "I use Qt, it is a 100MBs framework full of stuff I don't need but can't remove from the binary, a browser is included. Qt has a widget that can display web pages. What about just using the browser to properly load the images, with the additional benefit of not having to handle icon race conditions and memory management myself?"
So that's what I did, and it's so much better.
Afterwards, I'm not sure what was going in my brain but I decided it would be funny if I just removed the applications list and put a browser there instead.
Creating the Open Shop Channel Downloader Browser:
This was pretty straightforward. I took OSCDL, replaced the applications list with a QWebEngineView, modified a bunch of text around the interface and added an address box to change the address, a search box to search with Google, and a funny little spinning earth animation to remind you of them old classic browsers.
I've noticed that trying to use YouTube full screen straight up caused the program to crash, so I just made the browser ignore all full screen requests.
As a fun gimmick, I've also implemented a little feature: navigating to the pages of any app on the Open Shop Channel website would load the app metadata on the sidebar and enable sending it to the Wii.
Unfortunate change of plans:
A day has passed and it's time to finalize the april fools release. I try it outside of my development environment (exact same dependencies, versions, and same version interpreter), and for some reason, it just straight up crashed on the first attempt to load a web page. Amazing, of course it's as stable as Qt is a good company.
I return to my development environment in which it did work, and suddenly (while unlike outside, it does launch) it's crashing on random websites consistently: YouTube, Twitter, Reddit.
I get absolutely zero debug data, I get nothing, all I know is that what worked yesterday at the exact same environment with the exact same code mysteriously decided to annoy me.
So I had to change plans, rather than providing the binary for the barely functioning browser, I would put up a website showing it off when it does work and overexaggerate it in all sorts of ways.
And I did just that and ignored everyone asking me why I developed a functional april fools browser and gave it to nobody.
That's all there is to it, thanks for reading!
I love actively sharing things I do, and when it's about april fools I couldn't do that, so I've decided to post the (pretty short) background and development on this year's osc april fools, the Open Shop Channel Downloader Browser, and give some insight as to why the binary is not publicly available.
I don't think it's very interesting, but there are parts I feel like sharing.
If you've used OSCDL (Open Shop Channel Downloader), the desktop tool used for sending applications from the Open Shop Channel to the Wii with WiiLoad, you know that when switching between apps on the list, the gui freezes for a fraction of a second until it finishes downloading the icon image. Yes, indeed an unfortunate case of me not bothering to thread it.
So instead of threading it, my first idea was: "I use Qt, it is a 100MBs framework full of stuff I don't need but can't remove from the binary, a browser is included. Qt has a widget that can display web pages. What about just using the browser to properly load the images, with the additional benefit of not having to handle icon race conditions and memory management myself?"
So that's what I did, and it's so much better.
Afterwards, I'm not sure what was going in my brain but I decided it would be funny if I just removed the applications list and put a browser there instead.
Creating the Open Shop Channel Downloader Browser:
This was pretty straightforward. I took OSCDL, replaced the applications list with a QWebEngineView, modified a bunch of text around the interface and added an address box to change the address, a search box to search with Google, and a funny little spinning earth animation to remind you of them old classic browsers.
I've noticed that trying to use YouTube full screen straight up caused the program to crash, so I just made the browser ignore all full screen requests.
As a fun gimmick, I've also implemented a little feature: navigating to the pages of any app on the Open Shop Channel website would load the app metadata on the sidebar and enable sending it to the Wii.
Unfortunate change of plans:
A day has passed and it's time to finalize the april fools release. I try it outside of my development environment (exact same dependencies, versions, and same version interpreter), and for some reason, it just straight up crashed on the first attempt to load a web page. Amazing, of course it's as stable as Qt is a good company.
I return to my development environment in which it did work, and suddenly (while unlike outside, it does launch) it's crashing on random websites consistently: YouTube, Twitter, Reddit.
I get absolutely zero debug data, I get nothing, all I know is that what worked yesterday at the exact same environment with the exact same code mysteriously decided to annoy me.
So I had to change plans, rather than providing the binary for the barely functioning browser, I would put up a website showing it off when it does work and overexaggerate it in all sorts of ways.
And I did just that and ignored everyone asking me why I developed a functional april fools browser and gave it to nobody.
That's all there is to it, thanks for reading!
