hi pin87a and others:
this is the exact kind of post that i was after
1. i agree that the database system works much nicer in my music. however, it is also very powerful in my videos (not that we are using it to it's fullest extent), if only for movies that imdb has information on. the issue ofcourse is other types of videos (home movies, music videos, tv shows and the like) which don't fit in at all with this scheme. while i'd prefer not to drop the imdb views altogether, i agree that we need to come to some way of better use of it.
2. yeah - i agree with this one 100% - there is no real need imo for 2 different thumbnail views, and no real need to have the user switching between thumbs + lists - it should either be automatic (and really well tuned) or not available. in the sizing case, we can have this setup in the settings if users wish to view more per page etc - it's a one-off type setting most of hte time.
for music in particular, i think if we take into account the stuff kraqh3d etc. is working on, then this is a trivial operation. the idea would be to move users away from the purely filebased view to the database view. many (most) music playing programs are doing this, as it makes the most sense due to the metadata. it forces users to have well maintained tags, however, and on xbox this presents a problem as there is no decent interface available to most people to change their tags from the xbox itself. ideas/suggestions on this are most welcome.
3. agreed - kraqh3d's got code to do this just about complete, and we'll be adding it as an extra view as soon as it's available - the extra view will just be an interim step so we can have a feel for how well it's working and optimize it as necessary.
4. agreed - programs view should really be always thumbs, or at worse a list view without sizing information - this is irrelavent to the user. i'm not sure what sort of info is inside the xbe, but if there is any useful metadata there, then we could replace it with this, or simply remove the second label in the list control entirely.
5. indeed - agreed that this should be the goal. making the screen less cluttered + removing things that don't need to be there immediately.
given the above, i still think it makes sense to look into this multiview architecture. the main advantage as far as xbmc is concerned is that all the view code can be moved to a separate class. the advantage as far as the skinner is concerned is that there is more flexibility - we can redesign the separate controls to fit into the above schema more readily, without upsetting other areas of xbmc. (listcontrols are used all over the show, in many cases a much simpler control (without thumbs or second labels etc. etc.) is all that is required).
as always, lets discuss this openly and try and move the project forward
cheers,
jonathan