[Galefury]

The new menu looks great. I like icons. Hell, you can put anything you want in the skin, I'm still gonna use it !

[Piers]

Yes. Aesthetically it's in keeping with the rest of the design. Adding that as an additional option would make the skin complete, to me at least.

[butchabay]

May i ask why you've abandoned the new vertical home menu? Was the main reason navigation through submenus and widgets?

[knewknow]

Note that this is rough and just an idea I'm trying out. I'm curious to know what you guys think of it though.

It looks great, but I definitely prefer vertical menus over horizontal. One of the many reasons why I love refocus is the minimal aesthetic, which I think this design strays from a bit. I don't think that any of us can really form an opinion until we're able to use it ourselves though. Can't wait . Thanks again.

[bakito]

not a fan at all of the horizontal menu... I love the simplicity of refocus, now it reminds me of eminence, not that's a bad skin, it's just not my taste...I'll miss the overall esthetic of refocus I fear ...That is just my opinion, but it is also a deal breaker for me...
thanks for your time.

[Jeroen]

I honestly don't know why it's important to anyone to have all that clutter on the home screen , I've personally never ever clicked on a "recently added" or "in progress" item from home screen, I never even stop to look at all that. If I want movies, I click movies and sort by date added... I if I want tv shows I click tv shows.

Well, it's a bit of a balance thing for me. I like to use in progress items, but I don't like clutter either. So sure, you can take it too far and basically bring the entire video library to the homescreen. But I do like the convenience of seeing what is new in my library and getting to it quickly.

wayyyy to many clickable things in the screen... I hope this doesn't become a skin where the mrs looses her shit because she accidentally pushes down or up and gets lost amongst all the widgets and can't find her way back.

Of course there's always the possibility to not use widgets. When not using the widgets it's no more complicated to the vertical menu really.

Plus, what if in the future you want to add another clickable section to that menu or devs add another menu item to xbmc? How/where do you add it, without it taking you off the screen? It's already full.

Let's worry about that if and when that time comes In all the years I have been using XBMC add-ons has been the only "main-menu level" item added.

Although it looks cool, it's so far from original I don't see the point in all that. I hope you leave an option to stay vertical.

Originality wasn't the main motivation behind this. Just keep in mind that usage patterns vary per user.

You could just have the text for each category floating on top of the fullscreen background (with shadows to improve legibility)
, and moving left to right would highlight that particular category's text (something similar to Windows Phone 8 which uses typography based menus). When you drill down, you could then expand and show the recent items as you do now. But even for that you could simplify it and just have nice thumbnails of the episodes, movies, etc. floating on the background (again with shadows). So I'd do away with the icons and the blue borders and background of the main menu and go with a more minimalistic look that fits in well with the rest of your theme. Just my two cents of course.

The whole idea of going with icons is to remedy some of the problems I have with horizontal menus, so that's not a direction I want to go tbh.

May i ask why you've abandoned the new vertical home menu? Was the main reason navigation through submenus and widgets?

I haven't abandoned anything yet But yes and no. It's that and future proofing the menu. I would like to start using skin.shortcuts, or something similar, in the future. I was hoping to transition my current vertical menu to it. But while I'm not completely comfortable with skin.shortcuts yet, I don't think that will be possible. The home menu is actually one big grouplist full of conditions, the submenus are basically part of the same structure instead of a separate element.
The vertical menu uses about 830 lines of code. And that's without all the includes, variables and stuff around it, purely the structure. I could do without that

Thanks for your feedback people If I decide to continue with it, it will most likely not be in the upcoming release. One thing I might end up doing is create a separate temporary "experimental" branch on GitHub so I can work on it separately and let it mature. I don't know yet, we'll see.

[spoco2]

As far as horizontal menus go, this one is very appealing.

I still prefer the vertical one (especially your new version), as it's out of the way and keeps the screen clean.

I too am one that's never, ever used 'recently played', 'recently added' or any of those when it comes to video (I do use recently added albums a lot for music though).

[removed151214]

I haven't abandoned anything yet But yes and no. It's that and future proofing the menu. I would like to start using skin.shortcuts, or something similar, in the future. I was hoping to transition my current vertical menu to it. But while I'm not completely comfortable with skin.shortcuts yet, I don't think that will be possible. The home menu is actually one big grouplist full of conditions, the submenus are basically part of the same structure instead of a separate element.

If there's any help you need with, or features you'd like in, script.skinshortcuts feel free to ask.

[Paul Salem]

It looks really good Jeroen. And it not only looks good, it seems practical as well. At least to me, the navigation you have explained makes a lot of sense. I also think it allows more possibilities than the actual menu where you can only have the choice to leave a menu to go a different new one. Now you have more choices to go on the same screen, and I doubt you can easily get lost by pressing up or down. I think when people try it out they will probably be less sceptical about it, and it will be easier to provide more useful feedback.
And the icons look good , at least to me.

[dogzipp]

I love the horizontal menu, but how would it look like to someone that only uses "Movies, TV and Settings"? (no music, pictures, video, weather, add-ons or live tv)

[jmuck78]

Jeroen,

I love the aesthetic of the horizontal menu - the icons and color scheme really standout. That said, I prefer the vertical menu to the horizontal menu. If you can set this up so that the users have a choice to use either the horizontal version or the vertical version, you might achieve the best of both worlds.

Also, regarding the vertical menu, is it possible to incorporate some of the design/asthetics from the horizontal menu into the vertical one? Specifically, the menu icons? I'm not saying that's necessarily a good idea - just a suggestion.

As always, thanks for all your hard work on this skin.

[ian-ep]

Jeroen,

I don't like the look of that horizontal menu at all. Sorry. It looks cluttered and fussy. And don't get me started on 'mystery meat' icons. Please don't go down that road - or at least make it optional ...

Cheers
Ian

[09chja]

Hi Jeroen,
I love the new menu, it fits perfectly to your new / revised skin.
I've always been of the opinion that does not fit a vertical menu to a modern skin.

I think you should still make all your fans happy by trying to implement both version of the menu in your skin.

Do please keep it up when I follow the preview images, then I think it is a really terrific skin.

Keep your concept faithfully!

When do you think the skin will be available for public testing?

Sorry for my bad english !

MfG 09chja

[Namekkural]

Hi Jeroen,

This is amazing - I think you just designed the first horizontal menu I would like to use

Please take your time to add this menu, that would be so awesome. But please make it an option (vertical/horizontal) because as you can see some people don't like horizontal

I love how everything fits in one screen. Having to scroll horizontally is one of the reasons why I hated horizontal menus.
You did however keep the options for hiding everyone of the menu items, did you? I don't like clutter, just like loggio and I always hide unused menu items.

I'd gladly wait to have this horizontal menu in the next update!

Thanks for your time!
Jonathan

---

Btw. what do you think of designing a diagonal menu? would be something really new!!

just kidding... keep the good work going!

[GregN]

Hi Jeroen

That's one of the best horizontal menus I've seen. I especially like that you've managed to fit the whole menu on the screen at once - no endless scrolling left and right wondering where in the options you are.

Given that I'm still a fan of the vertical menu, it's one of the biggest reasons I use reFocus. So the vertical menu still gets my vote . Although I do prefer the previous version where it was a transparent overlay on top of the background.

Good to have you back!

Greg