[Touch Diamond2, Pure ROM Development] Verrigan:
Wow!

First of all, I'd like to say that I'm glad you like this ROM cooking method of mine. It has always been my position that the other ROMs available have too much junk in them.. Yes, they run faster than stock, but not always necessarily better.. Some of the ROMs out today eat up the battery because there's too much network traffic going on.. (Weather, Direct Push, Other e-mail account(s), and don't forget twitter & stocks..) This makes for a very short battery life, and I find myself, more often than not, charging my phone at work, because if I don't I end up with a dead battery by the time I get in my car.. Then there's the ROMs that have Google Maps, Bing, Facebook, etc. already built in.. But when there's an update to one of those and you install it, they replace what's in the Program Files folder, but not the Windows folder, causing the phone to have 2 different versions (most of the time the old version doesn't work) of the same software...

I chose 6.5 because of the larger module footprint.. But I am not stuck on 6.5.. I've considered switching to 6.5.5 to get the threaded e-mails, but 6.5.x is just not stable.. The settings windows don't even show their backgrounds half the time.. Just a button on top of the background that was already there.. Little things like that seem to bug me, so I went with the simplest version that has been tried and tested and seems to work well.

I don't much like Sense 2.5, to be honest.. It looks nice, and gets me sucked in for a while, but it is always slow, and I just decided I didn't need it anymore.. (Waiting for TouchXperience to come out.) However, I will be releasing this Kitchen to the public once I get to Melissa 1.0 Final... Then you'll be able to add whatever version of Windows, and whatever applications you want. :)

The keyboard in this ROM is the standard HTC keyboard.. (Forgot to mention that, but I will add it to the ROM Details section once I have more time...) But I'm completely open to suggestions.

For the future, I plan to clean up all the registry files, hopefully decreasing the excess space used by useless files in the \Windows folder.. (It would be really nice to be able to cook a ROM that puts files in whatever folder I want without 'copying' them and making duplicates.. heh) I also plan to remove the extra background images and sound files from the kitchen.. I'll probably make a zip or something with those in it so that people who want them can still have them..

My goal is to get this ROM to a very small footprint.. I had all apps removed on version 0.1A, but there was no way to use the camera or gsensor, so after a couple of months of using it that way, I decided to cook a more HTC-like ROM, but still slim...

I will gladly entertain any and all ideas for this ROM, and maybe if I can get my hands on WM 6.1, I'll create a Melissa ROM with that.. But I won't promise that I will do everything you ask, or that I will be able to do it in a timely fashion.. (I do have a day job :))

So far, I like what I have come up with.. Everything seems to work well except for a few odd looking menus that have wider tops&bottoms.. But other than that, I'm pretty pleased with where this ROM is heading.