[fbacher]

I'm trying to tweak a skin to make it work form my mentally challenged brother. I think there are many technologically challenged people who could benefit from a much simpler presentation. I am starting with the Transparency skin. I have set up a remote to use only 5-6 buttons, which I think is sufficient.

Now I want to turn off everything he doesn't need. I set up the start page to be Video. Now I want to prevent him from returning to the HOME page using his remote control. I got blood shot eyes looking at skin code yesterday for 8 hours. Even with the wiki article describing the xml files I am having real trouble figuring out which xxx.xml file goes with which screen. (I assume that comes after about 40 hours of staring). Can someone point me in the right direction?

I also would like to disable other buttons for settings and views he doesn't need (like playlists). Is this possible from within the skin? Can I add settings to xbmc to further control the skin behavior? (I suspect not).

Finally, I'm curious why numeric ids are used in the .xml files over string constants. Seems that getMsg("stopButton") would be nicer than getMsg("52"). Or <control id="RecentlyAddedMovies"> is better than <control id="75">.

Thanx

[igotdvds]

Good luck in your endeavor, wish I could help.

Give Mediastream a shot, its pretty basic with the add-ons disabled.

[Jeroen]

Be sure to check out "Empty": http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=29743

It's a _very_ basic skin, inspecting the code might give you a better insight in xml coding. The skin will show you the name of the xml file that is used in whatever screen you are looking at.