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Sally Project

About

Sally Project is an environment optimized for touch screens. It’s my biggest and most challenging personal project. I devoted all my free time and vacation time to it for four years.

The whole thing predates the iPhone area, but it was during that very time that it slowly matured into version 1.0.

Technology

Sally launches a full-screen program, which in turn contains various other programs. Additional programs can be installed via plugins. The Sally API allowed third-party software developers to write programs for the platform. It had a localization engine to translate the entire user interface and keyboard layout. There was also a theming engine that allowed users to customize the look and feel.

Almost everything was built from scratch—from the complete UI framework with forms, buttons, checkboxes, and more, all the way to the animation framework, theming engine, localization engine, and plugin API. I only had C++ and DirectX at my disposal. That was a very interesting time in my life, though it meant everything else took a back seat. I wouldn’t want to have missed that time. However, I also never want to build a UI framework from scratch again—from mouse input all the way to “drawing every pixel myself.” You’d be better off using WPF or something similar. If you’re interested in the API documentation or source code, check out the links.

API Documentation: https://www.der-knob.de/_projects/sallyDoc/

Port of ScummVM

As part of the Sally Project, I wrote a few apps that were easy to install. And since I'm a big LucasArts fan, I ported ScummVM to the Sally Project. The link to the source code can be found in the Links section.

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/DerKnob/scummvm-for-sally