(2014-03-19, 20:46)loggio Wrote: [ -> ]I honestly don't know why it's important to anyone to have all that clutter on the home screen , I've personally never ever clicked on a "recently added" or "in progress" item from home screen, I never even stop to look at all that. If I want movies, I click movies and sort by date added... I if I want tv shows I click tv shows.
Well, it's a bit of a balance thing for me. I like to use in progress items, but I don't like clutter either. So sure, you can take it too far and basically bring the entire video library to the homescreen. But I do like the convenience of seeing what is new in my library and getting to it quickly.
Quote:wayyyy to many clickable things in the screen... I hope this doesn't become a skin where the mrs looses her shit because she accidentally pushes down or up and gets lost amongst all the widgets and can't find her way back.
Of course there's always the possibility to not use widgets. When not using the widgets it's no more complicated to the vertical menu really.
Quote:Plus, what if in the future you want to add another clickable section to that menu or devs add another menu item to xbmc? How/where do you add it, without it taking you off the screen? It's already full.
Let's worry about that if and when that time comes
In all the years I have been using XBMC add-ons has been the only "main-menu level" item added.
Quote:Although it looks cool, it's so far from original I don't see the point in all that. I hope you leave an option to stay vertical.
Originality wasn't the main motivation behind this. Just keep in mind that usage patterns vary per user.
(2014-03-19, 20:49)onlinespending Wrote: [ -> ]You could just have the text for each category floating on top of the fullscreen background (with shadows to improve legibility)
, and moving left to right would highlight that particular category's text (something similar to Windows Phone 8 which uses typography based menus). When you drill down, you could then expand and show the recent items as you do now. But even for that you could simplify it and just have nice thumbnails of the episodes, movies, etc. floating on the background (again with shadows). So I'd do away with the icons and the blue borders and background of the main menu and go with a more minimalistic look that fits in well with the rest of your theme. Just my two cents of course.
The whole idea of going with icons is to remedy some of the problems I have with horizontal menus, so that's not a direction I want to go tbh.
(2014-03-19, 21:57)butchabay Wrote: [ -> ]May i ask why you've abandoned the new vertical home menu? Was the main reason navigation through submenus and widgets?
I haven't abandoned anything yet
But yes and no. It's that and future proofing the menu. I would like to start using skin.shortcuts, or something similar, in the future. I was hoping to transition my current vertical menu to it. But while I'm not completely comfortable with skin.shortcuts yet, I don't think that will be possible. The home menu is actually one big grouplist full of conditions, the submenus are basically part of the same structure instead of a separate element.
The vertical menu uses about 830 lines of code. And that's without all the includes, variables and stuff around it, purely the structure. I could do without that
Thanks for your feedback people
If I decide to continue with it, it will most likely not be in the upcoming release. One thing I might end up doing is create a separate temporary "experimental" branch on GitHub so I can work on it separately and let it mature. I don't know yet, we'll see.