It has come to my attention that over the last few years of development by jmarshall of the XBMC skinning engine we have come very far.  The problem is with progress comes change,  change is good (in some ways) unfortunately moving forward also mean sometimes breaking the old.  You just can’t keep constantly maintain backwards compatibility,  it slows things down and means extra legacy code to do the same thing that new code does better.  

So with that in mind I have decided to go through and update some of my older skins to work with the newer versions of XBMC.   I won’t be adding anything new to them but just making them work again.  With that in mind here is the first to fall :)

Xbox-Classic  

I know its not real modern looking and is a complete rip off of the original Xbox 1 dashboard but hey that’s what it was supposed to be :) Originally made by Blackbolt many a year ago It was updated by me (Jezz_X) a long time ago to work with XBMC changes and now I update it again :)

You can download an updated version from here

You can also get the skin from the XBMC skinning SVN at  this address

As promised in my previous post, TheUni and myself are trying to keep you informed about developments from within the XBMC community. To kick it off I’ve decided to pick one of XBMC’s most admired feature – it’s skinning engine.

Thanks to the great work of many, foremost jmarshall, XBMC has the most flexible skinning engine you’ll probably find in any open or closed source project. Skins basically control the GUI i.e. the overall look and, for a large part, feel of XBMC. Skins control everything you see in XBMC, from images, the sizes and positions of all controls, colours, fonts, and text, through to altering navigation.

XBMC ships with PM3.HD, created by Jezz_X, which is a revamped HD version of Project Mayhem III, designed by Chokemaniac. However, many user created skins can be found on our forums – for you to download – many which will completely change your XBMC experience. Additionally, one of our forum users (juju0) has created “XBMC Skin Manager” which makes it easier to download the latest versions of many skins.

If you are not familiar with any of the custom skins I’d highly recommend checking them out!

DonJ

Related XBMC wiki reading:
- Installing Skins
- Skin Development

XBMC Media Center 9.04 (codename: Babylon) final is now released. Versions for Apple TV, Mac OS X (Tiger, Leopard. Intel-x86, PowerPC), Windows (XP, Vista), Linux (Ubuntu PPA), Xbox, and a bootable Live CD/USB distribution (XBMC Live) of this free cross-platform media center software are available and are ready for download, (as usual the full source code is also available in our SVN repository under the GPL open source license).

Among the many new features in XBMC 9.04 is PPC (PowerPC) support for Mac OS X, VDPAU (NVIDIA GPU Hardware Accelerated Video Decoding for Linux), updated Codecs, new Karaoke features, more Media Info Scrapers, improved FanArt support, and of course enhancements to the XBMC Skinning Framework making it even more flexible and powerful. For the full list of what is new in this version of XBMC please see the 9.04 milestone on trac.

Team-XBMC would like to especially thank everyone who submitted patches and helped hunt bugs.

XBMC Community Forum discussion: XBMC 9.04 ‘Babylon’ released, ready for download

Further to my previous discussion, I’ve been playing with ways to improve navigation.  There’s two things that have just hit SVN:

Jump by letter down a list

Two new actions allow you to jump through a list by the first letter of the items (in terms of their sort order).  This probably needs a little more tweaking for certain usage scenarios but it works well for alphabetically sorted lists.  For numerically sorted lists (eg sort by track number) it’s not so useful, but then again sorting by track number isn’t useful for long lists anyway.  One idea I have is to ensure that the number of unique “sort letters” is sufficiently high (eg at least 10) before enabling it in a list – for instance, if we have 100 strings all starting with the letter A, we could switch to the first 2 characters as the identified piece.

Highlight the first letter while scrolling

This is pretty cool – as you scroll quickly, we have a new visibility condition Container.Scrolling which comes on, allowing the skinner to fade something in and out based on scrolling.  This, combined with the new ListItem.SortLetter info label allows the skinner to have a large letter pop up when you’re scrolling with the first letter of the sort order.  Quite a nice addition (even with my rather shabby skinning).

About

XBMC is an award-winning free and open source (GPL) software media player and entertainment hub for digital media. XBMC is available for Linux, OSX, and Windows. Created in 2003 by a group of like minded programmers, XBMC is a non-profit project run and developed by volunteers located around the world. More than 50 software developers have contributed to XBMC, and 100-plus translators have worked to expand its reach, making it available in more than 30 languages.

While XBMC functions very well as a standard media player application for your computer, it has been designed to be the perfect companion for your HTPC. Supporting an almost endless range of remote controls, and combined with its beautiful interface and powerful skinning engine, XBMC feels very natural to use from the couch and is the ideal solution for your home theater.

Currently XBMC can be used to play almost all popular audio and video formats around. It was designed for network playback, so you can stream your multimedia from anywhere in the house or directly from the internet using practically any protocol available. Use your media as-is: XBMC can play CDs and DVDs directly from the disk or image file, almost all popular archive formats from your hard drive, and even files inside ZIP and RAR archives. It will even scan all of your media and automatically create a personalized library complete with box covers, descriptions, and fanart. There are playlist and slideshow functions, a weather forecast feature and many audio visualizations. Once installed, your computer will become a fully functional multimedia jukebox.

It is difficult to put into words all that XBMC can do, head to the gallery to see some examples, or take the plunge and Try it Today.

quote from chokemaniac.net:

i’ve come a long way :) many things happened in the past 12 months. when i started this site, i only wanted a couple of screenshots of the project mayhem skin and a download button. but critikill made soo much more out of it. thanks a lot out to you bud. hope your current projects are going well.
a couple of weeks ago the new design was launched and i have t say i really love it. big props out to christian granqvist again for coding it for me! the latest addition is the new project mayhem forum. modhack, alexsolex and chris made it almost alone and i cant thank them enough. i hope all the skinners out there will join me there to take xbmc skinning to the next level.
i also worked a lot on xbmc with (my favorite coder ;) jonathan marshall. we came up with many nice additions like submenu, contextmenus, shutdownmenu, the new slideshow, new filemanager and the new settings system. and i think we’re gonna keep improving xbmc. i’m looking forward to it. big props to you too j. and thanks for you patience with me ;)
by now i released more than 20 skins for all kinds of xbox apps. more than 110.000 downloads so far and counting. not too bad i think. project mayhem iii is around the corner now. i planed to release it today but i’m not completely happy with it yet. so guess you gotta be patient a little longer. i think this will be my last skin for xbmc. i’ts a lot of work to keep 3 skins up to date. but anyways: i’ll keep suprising ;)