Moving right along. Not as much graphically to show for today but I’ve added hooks for network & keyboard [dis]connect, some new icons for the task tray, and updated the commandline control.
Will this scale up nicely on 800 x 480 displays?
I’d be keen to try this on the 5" LCD but you’d need to support the touch driver or can I hook into it as before with Clix2?
You can hook in same as Clix/Tinkr 2. Native and CP7 touch drivers will also come standard.
I should also mention there is a Font driver that has Tiny thru Huge. You’ve seen Small and Normal so far.
Is this still ROME or something entirely different?
Same thing, new name.
Sounds, the new Kernel.Drag (yup, drag whatever you like in 1 line of code), more notifications, settings, etc.
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So close to done with the “Retro” desktop I can taste it!
Everything works exactly how you’d expect it with zero effort. Add a RetroForm to the desktop, it gets added to the bar automatically. Close it and it gets removed. The buttons show and control focus. Tap the bar button for an inactive form and it activates. For a minimized one it restores. For an active restored one it minimizes.
Buttons on the form all work. Icon or no icon is all fine for the titlebar. Dragging is handled by the kernel and resizing might be soon as well. Haven’t decided if the form should control that or not. May be useful to expose to developers.
In any event: progress, progress, progress. 
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@ Skewworks - It is Looking really good. Well done on the work so far!
@ taylorza - Thanks man! Just finished up an important new control…Calendar. Why have we never had one of these before? Oh well, we do now. 
I do not want to be the Grinch, but I feel I’m loosing grip here. What is the purpose of this Slate/ROME? Looks like you’re building a full-blown operating system, pretty much a Windows clone. Given the price of the hardware that is needed to run Slate, any cheaper Lumia will do much better than your Slate. Unless, of course, you made it at least 5x faster than Tinkr2 so it could comfortabily run on G120. Did you?..
I’m also not quite sure how are we going to connect hardware and write apps for this OS. Could you please give some details about that?
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No worries. 
In the past there was Clix and Tinkr and Pyxis/Gadgetos. Slate upgrades and combines all three.
Simply, you only have to do one download and there are license keys for each of the major features. You purchase a key for each feature you want to use and no other features. The features are also grouped into separate PE files so you don’t overload the system with items you aren’t using.
Say you really, really need basic controls or an onscreen keyboard, or whatever. Buy just that.
Or let’s say, like me, you’ve amassed a large collection of NETMF/Gadgeteer hardware and you’ve got a couple of boards laying around that you’d like to do something cool with. Then you can load up the operating environment (which actually costs less than the controls because it doesn’t unlock them for development) and you’ll have a pretty complete NETMF PC to play with.
The biggest boon to creating the full system is that it really allows me to bang out any bugs with the controls or rendering systems, since they’re used so heavily.
The Kernel class has interfaces for just about everything sound, battery monitor, RTC, USB, etc. If there’s not already a driver defined for your module/board, simply write one for the interface. Here’s an example:
I’m using the DFRobot RTC module. I took the basic Gadgeteer driver and simply exposed it to IRealTimeClockHAL which has methods of GetDate and SetDate. Then I assign it to Kernel.TimeDriver and now everything using the system can access it.
Maybe I missed it in reading all the posts but is this in beta and being tested now?
Under ROME it was to be released for beta however there was a big change at Skewworks which shifted priorities. I’ve been at the new place for only 2 weeks (today) and have gotten back to the project.
It’s still not top priority but at least it’s back on the list. 
Ok well if you are still interested in beta testers I would be glad to help. I have a CP7 and Cobra II and Spider boards. In addition I have a bunch of modules.
Glad to see you are back on this because you have some really good stuff.
The Grid control (as well as a few other less cool things) is now online in Slate!
Grid is modeled after the Grid control for Win/WP8. Here’s the fancy part: columns & rows don’t have their width/height set by an integer, instead it uses a string. You can specify strings sizes of [number], , auto or [number]. Just like in the XAML Windows/WP8 control auto automatically sizes to the contents of the column/row. * is equal to the available space (after auto or fixed numbers) divided by the number of controls requesting . You can do [number] to take even more of that available space.
It’s taken a bit to get working but man is it slick. Controls inside the Grid can also have a Vertical and/or Horizontal alignment for Fill, Near, Center, Far.
What’s the big deal about that? Well Slate now also automatically selects font sizes based on the screen size. Basically you could build a page that would automatically scale fonts and proportions to any screen size it’s displayed on.
OK, now for some more wine & coding.