What do you use to control Jowaldo's skin? *NEW SCREENSHOTS*

[jowaldo]

I'm starting to change my skin over to be more remote friendly, and am wondering what the people using my skin use to control it with. I had been using a wireless mouse, but am sick of it and want to go with my ati remote. So I'm going to start chaning it to acommodate that. I'm curious if anyone uses it with a mouse, or touchscreen, if so I'll try to balance it out for the different kinds.

I'm still going to work on the ppc screen tho and keep them basically the same as before.

[Colby]

Good luck bro. Making a skin that accomodates the 3 (mouse, remote, touchscreen) equally well is a challenge. There are some decisions to make. Do you keep buttons for touchscreen people, or remove them for remote people? If both do you have more overlays or pages? And does adding these pages make it simplier?

Best of luck.

[jowaldo]

The way I plan on accomidating touchscreen users is having just one small button on say the music screen that brings up all the control buttons like play stop etc, that you wouldn't need if you had a remote with those buttons on it.

[summerall]

Please keep us touchscreen users in mind jowaldo.

[oajungen]

I am using the ATI remote control, but also love to use the PPC screen. So please improve them to if possible?!

[jowaldo]

I am using the ATI remote control, but also love to use the PPC screen. So please improve them to if possible?!

The ati remote and ppc are the things I use the most... so no worries

Summerall: don't worry, i'll keep touchscreen users happy too

[Aaron]

I build eveything for touchscreens...
this way you always have the buttons you need available for any usage profile.

Though I use a Touchscreen much of the time, I want my interfaces to be remote friendly because I will not always use the touchscreen... like when watching movies and such.

[jowaldo]

I build eveything for touchscreens...
this way you always have the buttons you need available for any usage profile.

Though I use a Touchscreen much of the time, I want my interfaces to be remote friendly because I will not always use the touchscreen... like when watching movies and such.

Watching movies is one of the main reasons I want my skin to be remote friendly... A touchscreen just doesn't cut it for most of the functions you need then.

[Arthur]

Hide functions behind a button works well for things not needed much (like the functions behind the musical note) however, I would definitly want to control play, stop, next, prev, volume etc direct on my music page. On a video page it's a bit different, as you are actually watching a movie and don't want to be distracted by al kinds of buttons.

[jowaldo]

Ok here is a super quick sample of what I've got so far... I need to clean all this up quite a bit, and the color/overall style is still going to change. I've only really worked on the layout so far. My goal is to have the menu's somewhat tivo like, aka only up/down/left/right/select needed for about 90% of the navigation.

I also got rid of the top toolbar with the buttons in the top right corner. I don't want it to look so much like a windows program anymore.

You can see on the first screenshot how everything is vertically aligned. This way with a right/left push, you can jump to the next column, then in the correct one, you can scroll up/down through all the available pages. The play control buttons will probably not be accessable through directional moves, cuz if you are using a remote, you can just use the play/stop/etc buttons on it, instead of whats on screen, yet the buttons are still there on the screen if you are using a mouse/touchscreen.

Also on the right side column are the tracks listed, and icons to the right of each track that signify with an X for not in queue, check for in queue, play symbol if its currently playing.





Let me know what you guys think, I'm open to all suggestions

[Arthur]

Cool.
+ The column idea good.
+ The little icons indicating playlist setting are nice
+ "no cover art" art is nice
+ easy to customize

- A bit to much blue (well can't please everyone)
- Sometimes you use yellow text and sometimes white, maybe it should be orange like the volume bar ?
- The "quick view" etc. buttons are very sharp.
- How do I get back to the "home" page?

This new skin could bring me to change my current setup

[jowaldo]

- A bit to much blue (well can't please everyone)
- Sometimes you use yellow text and sometimes white, maybe it should be orange like the volume bar ?
- The "quick view" etc. buttons are very sharp.
- How do I get back to the "home" page?

This new skin could bring me to change my current setup

I haven't done much with colors in those screenshots, I haven't jumped to that yet... I'm just workin on layout right now.

When you say those buttons look sharp, what in particular do you mean? Too pointy looking? I just wanted those buttons to stand out so its obvious what buttons take to you certain pages, and what page you are on.

If you click the music button on the top, it will bring up a pop up menu of the main menu options, including one to go back to the main menu too.

[Arthur]

What I mean is, you start with a rectangular shape on top-left (music)
Then you get 4 buttons which are pointy looking.
Then you get 2 completly different rectangular buttons to select play or queue
followd by information of the location of the album in the list (63 of 262)

It's a bit messy.
The pointy buttons do stand out. But there isn't a lot of room around them. I can't really say what kind of shape they should have (imho). Rectangular would be kind of dull. Round, hmm.. Maybe the page-indicator ("music") should be moved to the bottom left. Or maybe it would help to subdivide the left column (But some people dislike the white bars).

It isn't easy to improve your skin

Arthur

[jowaldo]

I see what you mean.. I definitley am going to change the style of some of those buttons. Right now I'm focusing on navigation and layout.. not so much on the style, but I'm all ears for any suggestions anyone may have.

[rika]

I have allways loved the functions in your skin. This is going to be great!
I´v used your skin as a base for learning to skin and hope to post the result in a near future, i hope you don´t mind.
Rika