2008-09-24, 18:51
Hello guys,
First off, I want to say MediaStream is amazing. It looks great and has become my default skin - the only skin to ever replace PM3 for me. There's never been a skin that both looked great and was practical to use for me - skins always seem to have some glaring omissions that render them unusable, hehe.
On that vein, Aeon's completely unusable for a few reasons but I absolutely love the way the home menu works. It's a very unintrusive bar with the options menus folding down instead of sideways. The reason this is great is because it takes up a bare minimum of the home screen when not in use.
One of the best features of these HD skins is the ability to display HD background images and fanart. Though MediaStream does a great job of showcasing the media in the many media views, the home menu does a very poor job of showcasing its media (the HD background images). The vertical menu must be very wide to accommodate the text, so it covers almost 1/3 of the background image at all times. A horizontal bar, though, showcasse the background much better for 2 reasons:
1) it is much thinner because it runs the same way as the text so there's no wasted space between menu items
2) because of the way images are composed in order to look good to us, losing 1/3 of the image horizontally (the bottom 1/3, for example) is nowhere near as distracting as losing 1/3 of it vertically (the left 1/3, for example). So the part of the image that a horizontal menu *does* cover is less important than the part of the image that a vertical menu does.
To show what I'm talking about, here are 2 screenshots:
With the left side of the image covered, much of the picture is lost. For all I know there was a boat in the water or a little girl throwing leaves in the river or something on the left side! By covering so much of the image with the menu the integrity of the media is really destroyed. This is especially noticeable when you look at many TV show backgrounds which have the cast standing in the picture, but half are missing hidden under the menu! In the Mario picture above, the light colored pillow thing (lol) would be covered and probably part of Mario's hat/head as well which would really wreck the picture IMO.
So my request is a modification to the home page to better showcase the beautiful HD backgrounds that are available to use with this skin. IMO there are 3 logical ways this could be done:
1) Add an alternate home menu or switch the home menu to an Aeon-style menu. A horizontal menu is simply a better option for showcasing HD backgrounds and making the home screen as attractive as possible.
2) Keep the vertical menu but add an auto-hide functionality. After 5 or 10 seconds with no change in the focus, the menu would slide to the left of the screen leaving only a small tab sticking out. Upon changing focus the menu would pop out again. This would look great when idle, but while scrolling through menus the images would annoyingly be cut off again.
3) Modify the vertical menu to not be so intrusive. This might mean making it see-through with dark text, or removing the black background completely and simply having some form of vertically scrolling text or something, I don't know. This would be a lot of work and require a whole re-imagining of the menu which seems like too much effort when there are other options available IMO.
Obviously I believe option 1 is the best solution. There's simply no denying that a horizontal menu showcases the background images much better than a vertical one. For a solution to be required, though, other people would have to agree there's a problem to be solved :0)
So before I get carried away, does anybody else miss the left 1/3 of their background images? Am I the only person who leaves XBMC cycling images on my home screen when it's not in use? Do enough people want a change that we can convince the devs to put some work into it? Hehe ;-P
I've thought about trying my hand at an Aeon/MediaStream mashup, shoehorning the Aeon home menu into the MediaStream skin, but having never skinned before it looks like it would be a HUGE project and I'm not even sure I'd be able to do it at all, so if I can convince the MediaStream devs to take up my cause then all the better!
Thanks for reading and I hope we can work towards make the best skin even better!
First off, I want to say MediaStream is amazing. It looks great and has become my default skin - the only skin to ever replace PM3 for me. There's never been a skin that both looked great and was practical to use for me - skins always seem to have some glaring omissions that render them unusable, hehe.
On that vein, Aeon's completely unusable for a few reasons but I absolutely love the way the home menu works. It's a very unintrusive bar with the options menus folding down instead of sideways. The reason this is great is because it takes up a bare minimum of the home screen when not in use.
One of the best features of these HD skins is the ability to display HD background images and fanart. Though MediaStream does a great job of showcasing the media in the many media views, the home menu does a very poor job of showcasing its media (the HD background images). The vertical menu must be very wide to accommodate the text, so it covers almost 1/3 of the background image at all times. A horizontal bar, though, showcasse the background much better for 2 reasons:
1) it is much thinner because it runs the same way as the text so there's no wasted space between menu items
2) because of the way images are composed in order to look good to us, losing 1/3 of the image horizontally (the bottom 1/3, for example) is nowhere near as distracting as losing 1/3 of it vertically (the left 1/3, for example). So the part of the image that a horizontal menu *does* cover is less important than the part of the image that a vertical menu does.
To show what I'm talking about, here are 2 screenshots:
With the left side of the image covered, much of the picture is lost. For all I know there was a boat in the water or a little girl throwing leaves in the river or something on the left side! By covering so much of the image with the menu the integrity of the media is really destroyed. This is especially noticeable when you look at many TV show backgrounds which have the cast standing in the picture, but half are missing hidden under the menu! In the Mario picture above, the light colored pillow thing (lol) would be covered and probably part of Mario's hat/head as well which would really wreck the picture IMO.
So my request is a modification to the home page to better showcase the beautiful HD backgrounds that are available to use with this skin. IMO there are 3 logical ways this could be done:
1) Add an alternate home menu or switch the home menu to an Aeon-style menu. A horizontal menu is simply a better option for showcasing HD backgrounds and making the home screen as attractive as possible.
2) Keep the vertical menu but add an auto-hide functionality. After 5 or 10 seconds with no change in the focus, the menu would slide to the left of the screen leaving only a small tab sticking out. Upon changing focus the menu would pop out again. This would look great when idle, but while scrolling through menus the images would annoyingly be cut off again.
3) Modify the vertical menu to not be so intrusive. This might mean making it see-through with dark text, or removing the black background completely and simply having some form of vertically scrolling text or something, I don't know. This would be a lot of work and require a whole re-imagining of the menu which seems like too much effort when there are other options available IMO.
Obviously I believe option 1 is the best solution. There's simply no denying that a horizontal menu showcases the background images much better than a vertical one. For a solution to be required, though, other people would have to agree there's a problem to be solved :0)
So before I get carried away, does anybody else miss the left 1/3 of their background images? Am I the only person who leaves XBMC cycling images on my home screen when it's not in use? Do enough people want a change that we can convince the devs to put some work into it? Hehe ;-P
I've thought about trying my hand at an Aeon/MediaStream mashup, shoehorning the Aeon home menu into the MediaStream skin, but having never skinned before it looks like it would be a HUGE project and I'm not even sure I'd be able to do it at all, so if I can convince the MediaStream devs to take up my cause then all the better!
Thanks for reading and I hope we can work towards make the best skin even better!
