Serenity

With the official release of Serenity only days away, it was time for another update. I have to thank DigitalHigh for putting so much of his time into this project. 4 months ago I just threw some concept screens into this post hoping anyone would find it the slightest bit interesting. It's amazing to open XBMC and have those concepts come to life. So thank you again Digital. Thanks also have to go out to all of the testers and translators as well as the XBMC community in general for showing so much interest in our little project. We hope Serenity lives up to all of your expectations.

I have put together screenshots of some of the sections of Serenity. I hope you all have enjoyed keeping up with this skin and the wait is almost over. Check back often because I will be adding screenshots to this post all day long.

I like this, I'm not sure how that second screen is supposed to work, but it looks reeeaaal purdy.

I hope you find an XML guy to help you out with this, I'd love to see it come to fruition (though to be fare I say that about 90% of the concepts I see :rolleyes.

I guess for the second picture the songs item that is selected could be left off. I was looking at it as you would select music and then the items listed in the second picture would be the new menu items, but songs should definately not be on that list.

If you select albums it would obviously list the albums then when you select a particular album that would be the list you would see. It shows off the tracks listed on a particular album. I did put these pics together rather quickly when the idea came to me.

It would take a little tweaking and thinking through all the menu changes and structure, but this is basically for a quick showoff of the concept. Details at this point would just be a waste of time since I can't program. I really do hope someone with some coding ability jumps on board with this, but I know what you mean rwparris2, it most likely will not and I'm okay with that. I just want to contribute in any way I can. Since coding isn't it, I figured I would give a few concept ideas and throw a couple pics together and hope it would materialize into a working skin. I guess only time will tell.

I think it looks great.I believe even if it don't play out,like you said,it is still contributing.I think a lot of mock-ups go no where,is not because the concept isn't used,it's because most mock-ups do not come from coders.I'm guessing a lot of small pieces of peoples ideas have been passed on.I'm also sure you will come across a few skinners who have gotten a few of their Ideas for the skins we love,from suggestions and mock-ups like this.

Please keep doing what your doing.

I sent you a PM about the coding. Basically, I can code skins, I've just never tried for XBMC before. It'd take some trial and error, but I think I could do this.

Go for it digitalhigh, it would be nice to see this skin in action.
I wish i had the skills etc to code but sadly i can't get my head round .xmls

XML's are great...it's just having good references for what the various tags can do. Between the wiki and PM3 as an example, it's really not too difficult to do.

I was just thinking, for various screen coordinants, I have this program I used to use for Winamp skinning that can take the overall dimensions of an image in photoshop and then spit out a file with the coords for various layers in that image. So, if you want a textbox right in the middle of the screen, you put a mask layer to the position and size you want in photoshop, run it through the program, then grab the coords from the resulting xml file.

Obviously XBMC is a whole different beast, but I looked at how PMIII is comprised, and it's pretty straightforward. I'd need to focus on the multi-image tags and the multi-select text. The trickiest part would be linking it all together...the various sections in music dynamically controlling each other...

Rather you than me. my limit to skinning is simply changing the existing graphics,
I did try to rewrite a skin a while back but threw in the towel, best left to the pro's i think.
I hope it works out for you assuming you do that is...

I definitely realize how much work is required, but I think that if I get the basic hang of it, it shouldn't be too difficult...

Sorry last post came across wrong i meant i hope you do code the skin and not do you know how as i know you do know how to do it