[jaga]

are there any plans to get rid of the left pane now that the context menu is in place? in icon/big icon mode, i find that that area wastes nearly 1/4 of the screen and i really never need that panel, except to change view. just a thought. whaddayall think?

[Asteron]

the left pane is a lot more newb friendly than the context menu. it makes the screen look more interesting too.... i think it best to leave it on by default but have an option to disable it for the real estate. however... this would be not possible with the current skin setup and may not fit well with the current gui architecture.

-ast

[jaga]

sure the left side is more intuitive, but it is useless for most of the people, most of the time. i so rarely touch settings there that i don't feel it is worth the space. just my 2c.

[elupus]

acually, it's just a skin issue. talk to some skin creators and see if there is somebody who want's to. there was a skn for 1.0 that had the menu on the bottom instead. i liked it alot, don't rember it's name thou.

[jaga]

the new "larry's theme" has the menu on the bottom as well.

[ubernewb]

or wait till i get my skin sorted out... i'm getting rid of the submenus on mine as well. partially because i don't use them, and partially to work with the art in the background image.
here's a pic of the games (my programs) folder...



that one was fairly easy.. working out the bugs with movies (my videos) at the moment.. it's being a royal pita.


btw.. any other skinners that can help me with some default view questions please pm me... thanks

[jaga]

it looks nice. that being said, you've lost the left pane but wasted the space. couldn't the girl be in the background, and you could display 4 small icons across?

[ubernewb]

yeah, you can move the stuff around all you want.. thumbview panel can be resized to fit with a few tweaks. here's some other screens that i've semi-completed..







you could stretch the thumb window to cover the entire screen if you wanted too, but i think that would end up making it look pretty plain..

[pin87a]

putting it on the top or bottom doesn't work well because you can't navigate "up" or "down" from a listcontrol or thumbnailpanel.
pressing left or right to get to buttons on the top/bottom is incredibly un-intuitive.

as it stands right now most of those buttons are required for xbmc to function properly.
maybe you could try to use icons that represent the function of the button instead of the big text buttons?