Edit June 2nd, 2011: Turns out that the extreme darkness is due to an Intel graphics output bug under Linux, causing it to output the desktop as 0-255 instead of 16-235, leading to crushed blacks and overly bright whites, which together with an already dark skin makes the graphics incredibly dark; if this affects you, see the discussion on page 163 for details (in particular this post).
Hi Big Noid!
Thank you *so* much for creating this beautiful and CPU effective and well-coded version of Aeon! Check my username, you can call me a fan.
I have some feedback, with point 3 being *very* serious:
1) When you install the skin for the first time (via the XBMC.org repository on Dharma 10.1), you can't see any Home menu entries at all, but you do see their backgrounds and can navigate. The solution is to either enter Settings again and then back to Home, or to restart XBMC. Maybe this is a bug that can be fixed? I can imagine newbies becoming totally lost and unable to shut down/restart XBMC. Luckily I've used XBMC for like 5 years and could find the Settings menu again, and then went back to Home to fix it.
2) Are you aware of this bugfix?
http://trac.xbmc.org/ticket/11585 I would guess so, since I am able to enter Home menu submenus with the down arrow.
3) The Aeon65 skin uses a much brighter background for overlay panels, such as the Settings menu and information overlays. Your skin uses
extremely dark backgrounds instead, and as a result, things like the toggle boxes for settings become near invisible,
literally. Please consider looking at Aeon65 and brightening your transparent backgrounds a bit. The Aeon65 skin's panels look beautiful and are easy to view. Yours, sad to say it, are waaaaay too dark, no matter if viewed on three different, calibrated computer LCD monitors, or on a projector with even darker blacks. It really needs some brightening up and Aeon65 is a
great example to follow. I had a shock when I entered the "Videos" -> "Add source" menu on your skin. It's almost pitch black on my projector, and super dark on my computer monitor. Does your monitor have calibrated brightness? It almost seems like the skin was designed on a monitor with the brightness turned way up, causing you to darken panels to compensate on your screen, which makes them nearly black elsewhere. I would love it if you copied the Aeon65 style. It looks beautiful and is pretty much the perfect brightness to be well visible on any display. With your current dark backgrounds, I can't even see stuff like inactive checkboxes, since they just meld together with the background, making it unobvious that there is a checkbox there.
4) Finally, please, PLEASE rename your "System" menu back to its proper name of "Settings". Other areas of XBMC (including other guides) all refer to it by its proper name of Settings (such as the XBMC "start screen" setting, which you can set to "Settings")... It is also ugly/weird to go "System > System > Input devices" rather than "Settings > System > Input devices", for example. The word "Settings" is the proper word here, both for reasons of XBMC consistency (since all other options and GUIDES refer to the menu as its real name of "Settings"), and also logically since "System" is a word that relates to system hardware, whereas "Settings" is far more logical (skin settings, localization settings, etc etc...). Seeing this fixed in the XBMC.org Dharma repository would make my day. You know, if you go into the Aeon Nox Skin settings and toggle "Enable breadcrumbs" to get the navigation bar at the top, and enter what you call "System", it will say "Settings" in the top left. Please just fix this, it's a simple thing but
very annoying. :p
Edit: Oh, even Confluence had this problem. I see now where you've inherited it from. Well, please change it to "Settings" so that it is in line with all the options in XBMC. Two wrongs don't make a right, and it *IS* internally known as "Settings" in XBMC, that *IS* the proper name. ;-) Heck, switch to the Confluence skin, enter its "System" menu, and you will see "Settings" in the top left. I will report this to Confluence too.
Edit2: Bug report submitted to Confluence. That report has all the details and reasons why it should be fixed. Please fix yours independently of Confluence, there's no need to wait for that skin to fix the bug first.
Edit3: Got a good explanation from Jezz_X in the thread above. He said the XBMC team has actually had a big discussion about this point a while ago. I've asked him for more details. It's obviously a point of discussion and confusion, and I was glad to see that the XBMC team itself has had a big decision about System vs Settings. I'm in the "Settings" camp, since it makes more sense (all kinds of Settings are housed in that menu, not just System stuff). But another point to be made would be that the submenu for it (by pressing Down) lets you enter the file manager, which would be seen as a System feature. Hrm. You can see why the XBMC team wasn't able to reach a conclusion.
Thank you and best wishes,
Aeon Nox Fan