Req some suggestions to improve GUI even further
#1
Hey ronie,

great job on the skin! After trying out all the skins, I like yours most. Two reasons: (1) I like the general look/design, and most important (2) Your "Fanart" view is the best view I found in all the skins, because it really puts the priority on making the fanart visible as much as possible.

Ok, here are a couple of things I would like to see improved, and a couple of ideas. Please feel free to ignore whatever ideas/suggestions you don't like. But maybe there is something you find useful. So here goes:

1) For my taste, the "buttons" in the vertical home menu are too small. Generally, I think the look of the vertical home menu is not as good as the rest of the skin.
2) I'm using the horizontal home menu, and I've reduced it to just "movies" and "settings". With just those 2 options, I find it confusing that it still has an endless cycle of these options. I'd prefer that it just shows the two options centered and that's it. Scrolling only makes sense if the options don't fit on the screen, IMHO.
3) Whenever I start XBMC it starts in the horizontal home menu with the buttons not focused. So I first have to press left/right or space to focus the buttons. I would like the buttons to be auto focused.
4) Since I usually only use XBMC to choose/start movies, when I start XBMC, I'd like it to start directly in the movie selection instead of the home menu.
5) The cover art in the "fanart" view often distorts the aspect ratio somewhat. Meaning the "fanart" view shows the cover in a different aspect ratio compared to how it looks when downloading a remote cover art from the internet. Would be nice if that could be fixed. E.g. always use the same width and scale the height so that it doesn't change the AR.
6 After a fresh XBMC start it doesn't remember which movie was last selected in the "fanart" view. So it starts at the ".." entry. I'd VERY MUCH like the fanart view to remember the last selected movie.
7) In the "fanart" view the left/bottom part is great. I'm not 100% happy with the right part. So some ideas:
7a) Maybe you could optionally add each movie cover as a small icon to the right side of the list view? Not sure how that would look, might be worth a try.
7b) Instead of a simple text list, maybe you could optionally use a mini "slide" bar, either horizontally, or vertically? E.g. like this:

|-- fanart + horizontal slide --|-- fanart + vertical slide --|

Of course this is just a quick demo. You could probably make it look nicer by not only reducing brightness and saturation, but also increasing transparency for the neighbor slides.

8) It would be nice if you could make the movie information screen adjustable. I don't want to see the "play count" and "path" information. On the other hand, the "plot" section is often too small to hold the full text. I'd prefer the top section to be smaller with less information fields and to give more room for the plot text.
9) It would be really great if there was a way to make bonus features / extras available somehow.

Btw, can a skin use a different/better scaling algorithm? The default algorithm used by XBMC/Transparency! is totally awful. Here's a little comparison that shows how scaling should properly be done (left side, Lanczos 3-tap) and how XBMC/Transparency! does it (right side, linear interpolation of just 2 pixels):

Image

This affects all situations where images are up and downscaled. The smaller you downscale to, the uglier it gets (e.g. in "full list" view all the little icons look terrible). I understand that XBMC might not be able to do better quality scaling on some low-powered devices. But if run on a decent hardware, a better scaling algorithm should really be used. This is probably something that would need to be fixed in XBMC and not in Transparency!, though? But if you can implement a custom scaling algorithm in Transparency! that would be extra cool. I don't know the technical limitations of what skins can or can't do.
Reply

Logout Mark Read Team Forum Stats Members Help
some suggestions to improve GUI even further0