(2013-06-19, 11:41)im85288 Wrote: FantasticN, once again great analysis ( I guess you should be a system tester )... I have not got the time currently to go through all the points you mentioned, but I will come back to them sometime. The pictures background will be changed to the white and black to be consistent and I may introduce a middle grey level..I'll have a play with the darker panels too to see if a dark grey is better. Thanks again!
EDIT - pictures view now corrected for both white and black panels
Hi im85288,
another thank you for the compliment. But it is you who is doing the great job and it is us who are just criticising you all day for the result :-)
But since you are very open to suggestions and have always welcome our comments and you deliver such fast response I think you have deserved a detailied examination of your work. Anyways, ever since you implemented the pictures section and the music video support and melted the views of the artic mod with the basis of the rainbow-version your mod has become the most advanced modification of the amazing Xperience-Skin that is currently available (not to forget that the Xperience-Skin itself already is the most impressive and innovative skin for XBMC currently available). So that is another reason why it is worth to have a closer look at it and give feedback.
Now as to the color issue I once again compared your current mod with the old "plusplus"-version (which was based just on the rainbow-mod) and I once again have to admit that I feel more harmony in color structure of that older version. So if it comes to finding orientation I would recommend using that "older" version for the basic color concept - which does not mean that some alternations or especially optional changes (like "dark menus"-switch, "show darker background"-switch etc.) should not be possible.
Another thing: I just recently added cleararts and logos to my movies and tv-series using Artwork Downloader (and cdART Manager for Music) and now I am very excited about these addition. It somehow adds an even more professional touch to the skin if appalied the right way. You should maybe try to make more use of these "gadgets" in some of the views. Also the logo could be placed on top of the screen, since in most views there is enough space wheras on the lower section a lot of infos (video resolution, pg-rating) are already displayed.
However, it should be the goal to reach a very "professional" look (like the skin of some standalone device) which needs a straight and clear layout, a consistens color and fonts system and the right balance between nice effects and displayable items on the one side and purity and functionality on the other. But to me it seems you are not far from reaching this goal.
Brgds,
FantasticN
Edit: Just realized that popup-messages during movie playback (I use a plugin to display incoming phone calls) are too dark to read (black box with dark grey fonts)