[CONCEPT] Concrete

Cool concept. Although I agree on giving it a more subtle tilt. And in the actual content windows I would not tilt it at all. There's some practical things I could see issues with but the idea is good. You could do some nice page transitions by moving the wall around when changing screens.

What I think the Now Playing ticket could look like:



To the skilled skinners out there, is there any way to manage the kerning of the labels? I want to compress the text and I'm not finding the way...

I love it all. I also like how the movies screen is laid out, even tilted like it is. It is sometimes hard to imagine usability until you actually use it. I'd build it just like you have it mocked up then make slight changes if need be. I do think the concrete could be a couple shades darker so the white text pops a bit more. Keep at it.

Feanor Wrote:What I think the Now Playing ticket could look like:



To the skilled skinners out there, is there any way to manage the kerning of the labels? I want to compress the text and I'm not finding the way...

You can't really set the kerning, you could however experiment with the aspect. This will squash the fonts so just use small steps.
You can do this by adding <aspect>0.n</aspect> to the font in fonts.xml.

Jeroen Wrote:You can't really set the kerning, you could however experiment with the aspect. This will squash the fonts so just use small steps.
You can do this by adding <aspect>0.n</aspect> to the font in fonts.xml.

Yes, I thought so... that's too bad, I played around a little with the aspect ratio of the font, but being this a skin so based around texts, it really gives it a weird look.
Anyone knows of a software to alter the kerning directly on the ttf?

Feanor Wrote:Yes, I thought so... that's too bad, I played around a little with the aspect ratio of the font, but being this a skin so based around texts, it really gives it a weird look.
Anyone knows of a software to alter the kerning directly on the ttf?

There are quite a few font creation applications out there.

High-Logic FontCreator
I recently tried this one and it seems okay. I havent tried changing any kerning setting though.

http://ilovetypography.com/2007/10/22/so...nt-part-1/

I've used FontCreator to mod my fonts too. Works good. Modding the kerning for an entire fontset is quite the task though

That said, font kerning in the skinning engine would be useful. I might make a ticket for it as I could use it in places too.

Jeroen Wrote:That said, font kerning in the skinning engine would be useful. I might make a ticket for it as I could use it in places too.

If it were in the XBMC engine it would allow for a lot more flexibility than just having to edit fonts all the time.

Really nice concept! I love the grayish background with the colored text. Keep up the good work!

I played around a bit with the listview and made a working copy(apart from the menu under "MOVIES", and some texture differences). Some issues.. The Title field is way to short for any movie with a longer name. It looks quite ugly to have it scrolling, so I made the field cover the rest to the left, which makes the place for the cover very small.
Another issue is with the genre field, movies rarely have only one type of genre to them so that field also scrolls.

And to the final issue, the rendering of fonts that are tilted are quite ugly. Straight blocky fonts become comic sans. And moves a bit "squiggly".

Navigation wise I can not see any problem though, this is apparently just a tilt of 11 degrees and that felt totally ok.