After almost 4 months of really hard work I’ve released ThrottleLauncher 1.0!! You can check it at throttlelauncher’s portal.
This version includes quite a lot of improvements. From OpenGL ES support to a full redesigned finger friendly configuration dialogs.
Thanks to your donations I’ve been able to buy an HTC Diamond on ebay 
. I hope to receive it this week or the next. It will allow me to finally test applications using a real hardware accelerated device.
Oh, BTW, I tested TL in my brother’s HTC HD2 device the past weekend and… it’s awesome. Transitions are smooth and fast even with the most complex themes… and without using any OpenGL!! (when I tried to enable OpenGL rendering it crashed X-D so I tested using the GDI engine).
Thank you everyone for the support!
I’m experimenting some problems when developing ThrottleLauncher due to the lack of hardware acceleration of my Omnia. I’m using Vincent’s software OpenGL driver, but I cannot get real taste on how the changes affect performance.
Also there seems to be some problems with the old libgles_cl.dll powered devices (Axim’s V51X)…
I’m trying to get somewhere an HTC Diamond device for testing 
. May be I can also make my brother test ThrottleLauncher in his new HTC HD2 
.
I’m also thinking of starting anew ThrottleLock development using OpenGLES for rendering.
FireSlave has just uploaded a video to youtube with a preview of his new theme MeizuM8. It’s a pity than the quality of the video is not too good. Anyway in the video we can see how cool the theme looks . I specially love the batery charging animation! The calendar view is also incredible.
Jappie has recently released two awesome themes for ThrottleLauncher. They remind me a little bit to the new WM6.5 Titanium plugin. They are both very functional, fast and cool themes. Definatelly worth a try .
After figthing with OpenGL ES and solving some integration problems I’ve finally been able to release for beta testing a fully functional version of ThrottleLauncher with hardware acceleration support.
The results are just incredible. Almost a 3x speed improvement over the GDI rendering engine!!
I’ve to say that this improvement is only posible in hardware accelerated devices with NVidia OpenGL ES implementation (opengles_cm.dll driver).
I hope to have this version released to public in january .
Right now I’m working in a new version of ThrottleLauncher. During the development of this version I’ve tried to improve rendering speed and performance without too much success… I think the rendering framework works as fast as it’s posible with GDI 
. Thus I’ve tried to extend the rendering framework to use DirectX first (without too much success) and OpenGL ES, wich I’ve recently sent to ThrottleApps beta testers.
I’ve used the wrapper provided by Koush here:
http://www.koushikdutta.com/2008/08/net-compact-framework-wrapper-for.html
I’ve encountered some problems though when using the wrapper so I’ve had to extend it and make some modifications like:
- Adding some more font’s to the GlyphRun class.
- Adding some more methods to create templates. So I can build them with my current framework instead of using Image API
By know the result are promissing… Seems like OpenGL ES could be the solution for ThrottleLauncher low speed in big screen devices (like VGA and wVGA).
There is no ETA on when the new version will be ready.
ThrottleApps forum entries