For the past month or so, I have been planning a new (yet another) shell for the CE. I've worked tirelessly on xFiles CE, spending hours adding features and whatnot to make the program more appealing for the users. After the SPD Release in March, I was happy with it for a bit. But then I quickly realized how bloated it was. It was around 40KB in size, packed full of tools... more than any other shell I created. It was a good program, but it was just too big. So I decided to come up with something new and slim, to shorten file size and get rid of those extra features that wasn't used very much. This gave me the idea of SlimShell, a much smaller version of xFiles CE, stripped down with a lot of it's bloat and a completely re-designed user interface, keeping it as simple as possible.

Here's an example of xFiles CE's user interface (1.03):



it was quite a mess and definitely not simple. I'm not really much of a fan of it, but it was all I had to work with.

With the new release of Celtic CE, I can take advantage over of the filled circles command, and with that I have created a beautiful and simple interface:



My goal for this program was to keep the size under 10,000 bytes, and I have accomplished this goal. I have kept the basics in, and made SlimShell as simple as possible.

A demonstration of the latest build in action:



As of today, I have finished the first stable build of it (I hope so at least), and I am planning on uploading it to the archives today.

This looks pretty neat, I like the animations when the program quits! I am a bit confused why it takes so long to initially load? What is happening behind the scenes when loading? I would recommend adjusting the padding between options like 'FILE OPTN SORT TYPE QUIT' so it's more equal. 'FILE' looks to be much closer to the edge of the screen than "QUIT". Looking forward to seeing this improve! (and perhaps get even smaller? )
TLM 1919th post!

I had a bunch of programs in CEmu for testing, so it takes longer to find all of the programs and put them in the app var. I also used Output for the options on the tool bar to save space. So unfortunately I won’t fix this to look better in exchange to preserve memory.

Behind the scenes when loading, it takes all of the programs and app variables and puts the names into their own app var. It takes time to gather everything and then write them to their respective locations.

So when looking up programs you're storing the names in another appvar and you're reading the entire VAT as opposed a subset of just what the user would be looking at on the screen?

rowSwap(Prgm for program names
rowSwap(Appv for app var names

However I made it so SlimShell doesn’t parse itself or those two app variables.

Oh my apologies, I was a little confused until I realised that this is using Celtic commands, which unfortunately I'm not an expert in.

Either way I really like the menus and animations. Are you going to be able to specify colours?

If you wanted your own theme possibly you could edit the code, but adding that would add extra bloat to the program which I don't want

A small update for SlimShell. In Build 2, I have added a toggle for whether the user wants the animation at the start and end of program execution. I've also cleaned up a few things and optimized some code, shortening the size to ~9,100 bytes from ~9,970 bytes. I've also squashed a few bugs, so the shell will be more stable than it was before.