7 November 2008 (v0.2.4)
- Able to view currently installed applications
- Fixed bug in downloading and removing applications which affected uno and may have affected other applications
- Retries increased to 10 times with a longer pause in-between
- Able to reboot the Wii by holding B and pressing Home
- Detects if you have a .elf version of any application and lets you update that application
- Now uses zip files which means download sizes are reduced (thanks Tantric)
- Added SDHC support
- Detects if HBB icon or meta file exist, if they don’t then it downloads them
Thanks to Tantric the Homebrew Browser now has zip support. This means that applications that were classified as having too many files can now be included in the HBB. Applications now will take less time to download however the trade off is it takes a little while to extract the zip files.
Download HBB v0.2.4 or run HBB on your Wii to update.
GREAT! But the first and second time a ran it, there was nothing listed under “media”? It’s working now though! And THANK YOU for adding GeexBox!
Three suggestions for improvements.
First is a usability issue. While marking apps which have updates available is an excellent idea, choosing green for current apps and blue for updated apps is a bit problematic. Blue and green are fairly similar and can be difficult to tell apart at first glance on small SD TVs. If one is blue-green colour blind, it’s impossible to tell.
I would suggest changing the blue colour to a dark yellow or amber, following the usual green == good and yellow = warning.
Second is a user friendliness improvement. I don’t know if it’s possible with a) the Wii or b) your code, but having a background downloader thread would be beneficial, allowing the user to look over the current screen while the next screenful of apps loads in the background, for instant display when the user clicks next.
If the user clicks next while the background downloader is still retrieving data, or if the user changes categories, then display the Loading… screen. However, if the user is on the current screen for more than a few seconds and simply clicks next, the user shouldn’t be forced to wait for data the code had a good idea was about to be requested (i.e. basic read-ahead caching).
Third is also a user friendliness issue. The About button sometimes provides less than the bare minimum needed to adequately describe some of the apps. Longer descriptions are generally available in the meta.xml files included with each app; putting a More Info button on the screen to display the longer description would aid those users still uncertain as to what an app actually does.
Past that, HBB is a much needed tool that has been executed quite well. I very much appreciate your efforts.
Cheers.
Another great update!! Zip downloads are much better, not tryed it yet though..
and I second all that Craig suggests above!!
I hope you take what he said into consideration as I too would like the colour change tick, more info and next page cache – would make it alot easier to use!!
I would love an updates section (lists all apps that need updating) and/or an ability for one-click updating of apps. Great work!
is there a way to show if an app needs the gc controler or just a wiimote
source?
i’d love to try to implement background download.
Since today I get a ‘fwrite error: [i] not owner’-error. HBC has been updated to 2.4 some time ago, this error did not occur before. I am able to connect to internet and (ie) to look at the weather and the news, so it looks like the internet is working.
Any idea how to fix this?
The only way that I know of to fix that problem is to backup your SD card data and then format the SD card.
After formatting it works. Thanks! 🙂