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We were lucky enough to be granted an interview with Shaun Taylor, the creator of the popular DS homebrew application DSOrganize. For those those few of you that haven’t heard of DSOrganize, it is as the name suggests an organiser application, but it has much more than that including a web browser, an IRC application and an audio player. Another cool little feature is the ability to download from the homebrew database directly onto your DS

We asked Shaun a series of questions, here are his responses. We hope you find this interview as informative and interesting as we did.

“First, a little about me: I am 21 and currently pursuing a degree in Computer Science, and have recently transferred to UCLA. I am currently working at ViaSat part time while I go to school, and before that I worked at Best Buy in Mira Mesa on the Geek Squad. DSOrganize is my first major project on a console, but I have had other somewhat large projects on the PC such as YoungMX, a media player I wrote for myself and a few friends.”

What were your motivations behind creating DSOrganize?

“When I started getting into DS homebrew, I really liked the idea of having touch-based inputs on the device itself. It meant that I could design a whole array of applications that used inputs similar to a PC but tuned specifically to a small device. However, I didn’t start with DSOrganize right away. I was rusty on my C and had never developed for a console before, so I started off with libfb, HappyCat Demo, and DrugWars (my only successfully homebrew game). Rolling around to a new semester at school, I thought it would be really neat if I could throw together a really quick organizer-style application that allowed you to take notes down, much like the pocket schedulers they used to give out at middle/high school. I got to work writing a small calendar display app, and then released a small demo that allowed you to save reminders on the GBAMP and SuperCard CF based on a specific day. Most of the application was based around my already-written libfb code that could display word wrapped text and manage a cursor. After that got out, a few people in the scene suggested a day viewer with time slots to schedule your day, and DSOrganize kind-of grew out from there. I never really meant it to get as big as it did, but I keep getting good suggestions and ideas and I am not bored with it yet.”

What are your favourite features?

“My favorite features are probably the Audio Player and the Web Browser. Both of them were very hard to get working, and represent an awful lot of work to get to the finished product. Also, being a geek meant that I felt way cooler walking around school listening to a device that I programmed myself. The web browser is another favorite due to the fact that I can show off what the DS can do with a very limited amount of ram. Other than that, any feature that specifically uses DS hardware, such as the audio recording function, is one of my better-liked features simply due to the novelty.”

Are there any restrictions due to the limited power and memory of the DS that have shaped the features of DSOrganize?

“A better question might be, what areas of DSOrganize did you not feel limited in terms of memory or power? The Audio Player is a constant struggle to keep the stream going in real-time. Each format that I add has to be tweaked and worked with until it can play back seamlessly. The web browser is also very hard to work on due to limited memory. After DSOrganize loads in memory and creates all the data, I have just about 2 MB of ram to work with in order to load the page, render it, render any images, and parse any auxiliary stuff like CSS. It’s lead to me specifically designing the rendering mechanism to do things such as render in its own footprint, and using the card as cache space.”

There seems to be quite a community of people using DSOrganize, is their feedback useful in further developing the software?

“Definitely! Most of the features in DSOrganize were suggested by users, not thought up by me. I don’t know if it will surprise anyone, but I hardly use DSOrganize for the organizer portion. I am content to use the streaming playback support and the IRC client. Thus, since I don’t use a lot of the applications on a day-to-day basis, I am dependent on people that do for suggestions on improvements. Major features such as the address book, audio playback, the picture viewer, and the text editor were all requests that I thought were cool and implemented. Also, many GUI and usability tweaks are suggested by users, and things such as the tabs on the Web Browser and IRC, or the pull-up menus on the browser, were thought up by users and suggested to me.”

In general, what are your thoughts/concerns about the DS home-brew scene?

“Although I try to stay directly in touch with my user base, I tend to be a little distanced from the homebrew community itself. Other than talking with a few other developers over MSN and reading/posting on GBADev, I fly solo. The scene is basically like any other: mostly users who enjoy what they are using, developers who enjoy making things, and people who try to learn from each others’ code. I’ve paid close attention to certain projects such as NDSMail for his ability to get SSL working, and I watch for homebrew games to come out during the competitions. So far, my favorites have been the port of World of Sand, and QBX, the 3-D Tetris-like game. I don’t know what the scene will do in the future, but I don’t think it’s going to explode exponentially or drop sharply for several years. It’ll probably remain how it is, as it’s gotten to a fairly stable point.”

Do you have any other projects running at the moment?

“On the DS, no. On the PC, I have the aforementioned YoungMX, but I only open it up occasionally as I really have it where I want it to be. I tend to concentrate on one thing, as I know if I start two projects, I’ll end up abandoning one for the other.”

Have you got anything planned for the future?

“DSOrganize is always open for improvement. For the past year or so I’ve wanted to put in a multi-protocol instant messaging app, mostly so I can get to my friends on MSN and AIM at the same time on the DS. Perhaps the Web Browser will eventually get SSL which means it’ll go to web mail and such. I’ve also been tinkering with the existing apps, trying to make them smoother to operate. DSOrganize doesn’t really follow a rigid schedule. Many of the features are suggested over IRC or mail and I go “hmm, that sounds fun, let’s do that!” …and I’ll just add the feature that day. It really depends on what I feel like adding at the moment.”

Do you have time to play games on the DS

“Yea, I tend to sneak in a little bit of gaming here and there. I mostly enjoy puzzle games, so I play several of the popular puzzle titles on the DS, as well as animal crossing, as I have to get my town back into shape. I’ll occasionally play Mario kart online with friends over IRC, but that happens every month or so at best. I also play a little bit of guitar hero, DDR, and random games here and there for the wii. I collect antique consoles, so I have around 30 classic consoles with a bunch of the games that made them famous, so I’ll occasionally jump onto one of them and play my way through video game history.”

Is there anything else you would like to get across to our readers?

“You asked me to elaborate on the media cart fiasco [editor: for those of you that don’t know a certain company has recently released a commercial DS Media card using a pirated copy of DSOrganize] , so I’ll touch on that. I’ve been in contact with the developer of the cartridge for some time now, and it seems they are dropping manufacturing of the card. We negotiated for awhile and I gave them some options in order to make me happy with them. They could open source their code, and provide code with the cartridges. They could license MY portion of the DSOrganize code from me, and I would grant them full publishing rights without need to open source, but this wouldn’t encompass any GPL libraries that DSOrganize linked against, just the DSOrganize code itself. Third, they could drop the card completely. They balked at the first term, stating that some of the code was proprietary and couldn’t be released, and when they offered to license it from me, they offered a paltry $322 for the use of at least half of the features in DSOrganize. When I quoted them what I thought was fair for the price, they flipped and said it was too much, and stated that maybe they should just drop the card altogether. Right now, the ball is in their court, and they have the final decision on what they want to do with the code, but I don’t know if the device will come out.”

Please give Shaun a visit at his website www.dragonminded.com