Feature req.: Grid view, search function, favorites

[hiatsu0]

I'm sure you've already thought of this kind of obvious potential features but I thought to make a request anyway:

1. Grid View. The current fullscreen-only view of title images as it is now is nice and all but I think a grid would look even cooler. Similar to what you have in the app homepage. Ability to zoom from 1:1 to 3:3 to 5:5 to whatever grid size you like, using the 'standard' Ctrl+mouse wheel or +/-, would be superb. There are performance setbacks I'm sure but processing images to different sizes should still be pretty fast. Caching different image sizes obviously helps performance in expense of disk quota.

2. Search function. Would be nice if the library could be automatically filtered down to matching titles when you simply start writing on the keyboard - more than just by the first letter as now. Again similar to the website search and again this might require a pre-generated index file for good performance.

3. Favorites or Recents. When I find a great title, it would be nice to make it pop out some way if I want to revisit again. Marking titles as favorites or keeping an easily accessible list of recently opened titles would be great help here.

Extra: Making the ialauncher startup a bit faster. Now, at least on M1 Mac (rosetta x86 emulation), it takes a little while (~40 secs) for the counter to run all the way to ~3000 titles. It would be great if this phase could be sped up a little somehow.

[JaapJoris]

Thanks for these excellent suggestions!

You are totally right that the current user interface of IA Launcher is extremely basic. Before I explain how this could be improved, first a little background as to why this is.

Originally IA Launcher was developed for a retro games exhibition in my local public library. IA Launcher would run on a bunch of micro PC's connected to oldschool CRT monitors and clicky beige keyboards. Children would walk by, watch some title screens, and hit Enter when they saw something interesting. For this use case there was no need to provide further user interface elements like search menus. IA Launcher was started upon boot with the command line argument --slideshow 10 which makes a random title screen appear each 10 seconds.

Since then, I've rewritten IA Launcher using pygame which makes it much faster to scroll through title screens. Unfortunately, I haven't had the time to re-implement the grid view feature that was present (but unused) in the 1.x version. As you said, it would be fairly easy using pygame's support for images and surfaces. Since it is a games engine, it would be very feasible to code some cool screen transitions too!

A search function would also be very handy. This is partly implemented: if you type a letter the menu will jump to the first game starting with that letter. It could be greatly improved by caching the recently typed letters to narrow it down further. Of course, the current search phrase should also be shown on-screen.

Finally, I've always wanted to have a Favorites feature as well! It could be as simple as a numbering system: type 1 through 9 to rate the current game. Then, there should be a way to display only the games that were rated with a certain (range of) numbers. But of course, there's many ways to do this.

I think all these features are valid and desirable, so this issue will remain open until they've been implemented. However, I'm currently not spending much time on this project, so I invite everyone who reads this to participate and maybe even try to implement some of this stuff themself. I will happily accept pull requests.

(As for the loading time, I have create a separate issue for that: #14 )

[jgbrwn]

Hi just wanted to say this program is incredible! Must have been a ton of work obviously to add profiles for every game…

Any update on the possibility of a search functionality addition? That would really make it absolutely perfect.

[JaapJoris]

Thank you @jgbrwn , it was indeed a lot of work!

However, I consider the work now done. IA Launcher is happily purring along as a screen saver in my games room. I have no plans to add a search function, although I should mention that the official IA Launcher website has a search function. It's implemented in pure JavaScript 1.1 from 1996!