Quirky speaks up about the future of Bunjalloo, a web browser for the Nintendo DS.

Read on:

Lately I’ve read some positive comments about my home-brewed web browser on a few different forums and news sites. It’s nice to know that people find the software useful! I’ve also received some suggestions via email on how to make the browser even better for people. One of the interesting things about having a homebrew browser is that it can do things that the official browser can’t, like download files to the memory card or provide translations for languages other than the official 5.

So with this in mind, I’m now working on improving the way Bunjalloo downloads files. Currently it’s not very user friendly and requires you to download the file, then save it. This is pretty unintuitive – it’d be better to sniff out the MIME-type of file that the user clicks on, then either download and show it for supported image and text MIME types, or offer to save it to disk for “exotic” MIME types. Y’know, a bit like everyone else does it 🙂

As for translations, there’s not much user interface to translate at the moment, but what is there has now been pulled out into resource files, defined per language. Currently only the languages supported internally by the DS are selectable, and the language displayed can only be altered by changing the DS’s language option from the system settings. But this is only a beginning, if there is enough interest I can extend language support to those not built in to the DS via a configuration option. The actual translations into other languages need doing, so if you want to help out let me know. I have English and Spanish done, Italian, French and German are needed, as is Japanese. Sadly Japanese won’t work without changing the font, the one I have at the moment doesn’t include the full range of universal characters.

Speaking of helping out, keep that feedback coming. Star issues that you think are most important, report bugs, even write patches 😉 There’s a new mailing list/forum for discussing Bunjalloo if mailing me is too much hassle. I look forward to hearing from you!

http://quirkygba.blogspot.com/2008/02/bunjalloo-update.html