[xodi]

I think the category icons look comically large. Making them as wide as other poster & thumb columns just for visual consistency is not worth the compromise in utility. (Side note: the always visible "update library" button from Estuary v1's more useful small icon row is already being missed by others in my household.) The large row of categories combined with the very large clock in the top-right makes the home screen feel off balance right from the start, as if there's some sort of scaling issue going on.

I just don't consider the categories as "important' as the individual media items below them, which should have the spotlight. It's also odd to have a second icon row for genres sandwiched further down.

On a 16x9 TV using v2, there is now so much more vertical and horizontal hunting required that the awesome overview feeling of the home screen is lost. Especially if you have a few in-progress items...



... one row of 2 items.

Maybe the media artwork and category icons could be shrunk a little to see if more could fit on screen, but personally I think if anything further is done then the consistent width size between the category icons and the media artwork in the widgets below needs to be kept.

It looks like there is plenty of dead space that can be trimmed away to get back to seeing 2 rows of 5 items (on a 16x9 screen anyway, which surely applies to the vast majority) without shrinking the artwork. The left-side nav column can lose a lot of width, and the padding around media items and at the beginning of each row could be reduced.

Right now it feels like excessively large buttons and margins are squeezing out the actual content. I'm really not liking seeing so many images cut off at 3 different edges of the screen. As someone mentioned on the blog post, maybe it's an OCD thing.

i agree 100% with all these comments.

+1