2008-07-31, 15:44
Ok....had a chance to play with it, and these are my thoughts:
1) In terms of a concept it's great. The thought put behind the images is good and I think that the whole skin has been very considered...it's a great start. You do need to state, however that it's primarily for 1080. I have a 16x9 SD 28" Widescreen TV and I doubted that this will run very well....it did run, but it was a little slow in transitions, etc.
2) The biggest hurdle for me, is that it's all very confusing. I know that 45% angles for navigation and on home it seems to work...from that point on though it's very confusing and I got lost on a couple of points.
3) I could not force Library mode in music.
4) I could not force library mode on movies. All I seem to got was filemode, which was hugely annoying to begin with
5) Both your views really are not that useable at this early stage. I can see the appreciation for something different, but when dealing with angles you need to understand that people will get confused whether they should be clicking up/down or left/right. This got me a few times
6) There are some animations on your somewhat-unique coverflow views...the new focus popped up before the small non-focus version of covers / posters had moved into place.
This is really as far as I got. If I'm being honest at this stage, I would summarise the following: It's a really unusual concept that grabbed my attention from the outset. However, the navigation and lack of library support ended up with me getting frustrated with the skin...and this is not a good platform to begin a new skin with. You will want to draw people in and not push them away.
Hope this helps, and dont let it deter you. Take everyones thoughts and start to look at a good concept and try to improve from this point on.
1) In terms of a concept it's great. The thought put behind the images is good and I think that the whole skin has been very considered...it's a great start. You do need to state, however that it's primarily for 1080. I have a 16x9 SD 28" Widescreen TV and I doubted that this will run very well....it did run, but it was a little slow in transitions, etc.
2) The biggest hurdle for me, is that it's all very confusing. I know that 45% angles for navigation and on home it seems to work...from that point on though it's very confusing and I got lost on a couple of points.
3) I could not force Library mode in music.
4) I could not force library mode on movies. All I seem to got was filemode, which was hugely annoying to begin with
5) Both your views really are not that useable at this early stage. I can see the appreciation for something different, but when dealing with angles you need to understand that people will get confused whether they should be clicking up/down or left/right. This got me a few times
6) There are some animations on your somewhat-unique coverflow views...the new focus popped up before the small non-focus version of covers / posters had moved into place.
This is really as far as I got. If I'm being honest at this stage, I would summarise the following: It's a really unusual concept that grabbed my attention from the outset. However, the navigation and lack of library support ended up with me getting frustrated with the skin...and this is not a good platform to begin a new skin with. You will want to draw people in and not push them away.
Hope this helps, and dont let it deter you. Take everyones thoughts and start to look at a good concept and try to improve from this point on.
...what is the point of making closed source skins for an open source media center?
