Author Topic: New UI1 Orbiter skin  (Read 48626 times)

los93sol

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Re: New UI1 Orbiter skin
« Reply #45 on: November 17, 2010, 10:52:03 pm »
Good call on that popup dialog space being reserved, fully agree that it's quite annoying when it pops up and covers things up, it's also a bit annoying that we can't review past dialog messages, but that's another subject altogether...

Re: getting the look right with removing the rectangle, have you tried just going straight across it and doing like a roll effect on the edge so it transitions down to your content canvas nicely, and the same thing back up across the bottom.  I like the symmetrical look/design you've got going, what about slimming the LinuxMCE logo down to the size of the round buttons you have up top and centering it along the bottom edge so you still have room for the popup dialog on either side of it.  That should leave you with ample space for additional buttons at the bottom as well...just a thought, I'll try to photoshop my thoughts when I get home from work tonight.

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Re: New UI1 Orbiter skin
« Reply #46 on: November 18, 2010, 12:45:25 pm »
DragonK, you've proceeded very well, looking forward using your design.

I also felt the frame being the only downside to your design. Not that it takes up some area but the sharp corners, there's something there. They, somehow, don't go with the round buttons optimally.

Have you tried rounding the corners of the frame? Might not look as  good as it does now, but might be worth testing?

DragonK

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Re: New UI1 Orbiter skin
« Reply #47 on: November 18, 2010, 07:23:16 pm »
HI,

Made the corners of frame round and dropped the frame.


I'll try to photoshop my thoughts when I get home from work tonight.

Adam, I really wanna see what you meant.

Karel

los93sol

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Re: New UI1 Orbiter skin
« Reply #48 on: November 19, 2010, 09:31:13 am »
Karel,

Sorry for my pitiful PS skills, but this is sort of what I had in mind, your last mockups were pretty close to this.  The area to the right of the LinuxMCE logo would make a perfect area of reserved screen real estate for popup dialogs...



And for the button arrays something akin to the blackberry style would probably look really nice...here's an example


DragonK

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Re: New UI1 Orbiter skin
« Reply #49 on: November 19, 2010, 10:38:02 am »
Adam,

The BB black buttons would work nicely I think. Will give it a go.
From what I understand with the buttons at the bottom, the play/pause, stop ect.... will be on all screens? Similar to C4's screen?

Then I have came accros that popup block and was looking at it, but now I lost the piece of paper of what the design_object's number was. And I cant seem to find it again........ Do you maybe know?

Karel

los93sol

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Re: New UI1 Orbiter skin
« Reply #50 on: November 19, 2010, 01:36:07 pm »
The play/pause, etc. buttons wouldn't necessarily have to be on each screen, I didn't explain my thinking very well before, what I meant was, for instance, when you have media playing, or are on a phone call, etc.  If you're navigating screens outside of the control screen for the current 'audible activity' (ie. watching tv, listening to music, on a phone call), that space could be useful to place relevant controls for that 'audible activity' so that you could do things like drop the call, play/pause, maybe place light/volume controls in that space, just trying to think outside of how we currently do things in the UI to update the functionality while you're working through this.  Personally, I think this would make the experience much nicer.  I was thinking about the popup dialog too, that area could be a general information area of the screen so that when you have media playing, etc. that information could be shown there, and when a popup dialog needs to display, swap out the information...just a thought.  I'm one of those people that likes for things in the UI to be extremely fluid and symmetrical, I also like for things to be sensibly placed with pre-defined standards so the user can anticipate where certain controls will be on the screen without having to hunt around each time they see a new screen.

Again, you're doing great work, keep it up!

DragonK

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Re: New UI1 Orbiter skin
« Reply #51 on: November 19, 2010, 07:39:35 pm »
Thanx Adam,

That makes sense. I understand now what your vision is. And I agree with you about things being fluid and in its place.
Im in two minds about keeping the frame or dropping it.
I wonder if its posible to scroll a playlist/filelist datagrid to the sides instead of up or down?

Karel

los93sol

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Re: New UI1 Orbiter skin
« Reply #52 on: November 19, 2010, 09:18:17 pm »
Thom...if I ask very nicely, can you overhaul the media views so we can eliminate having a list and a datagrid and just have a navigable grid of coverart?  If no art is present just display the name in the space?  :)  That would be sooooooooooooooooooo much nicer than how it is now!

Media on our systems can change regularly, even daily, doesn't it make sense to be able to scan foe updates from the UI so we can start moving closer to a system that tags media for us?

DragonK

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Re: New UI1 Orbiter skin
« Reply #53 on: November 19, 2010, 09:29:52 pm »
Adam,

Isnt that what they want to do with clutter or qt?

http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=10214.0

Karel

los93sol

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Re: New UI1 Orbiter skin
« Reply #54 on: November 20, 2010, 12:50:01 am »
Yes, but we still need to get a functional proof of concept.  Personally I don't think it's even going to happen, not enough people understand our current system, and there's not been any tangible progress on that front in almost a year already.  It's just such a massive undertaking, I don't see it ever happening and see more value in slowly migrating off of what we have already instead of trying to to a full blown overhaul, we really just need a few people do take ownership of it and continue to hammer it out.

DragonK

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Re: New UI1 Orbiter skin
« Reply #55 on: November 21, 2010, 08:56:30 am »
Hi,

Adam, what are ur thoughts of keeping the frame for the UI1 and dropping the frame for the UI2 variant.
From the mockups, the buttons with the blue outer line, I'm thinking using them for highlighted or selected states.

BTW, i found the design objects for the Status/Alerts pop-ups. Just seeing how I'm gonna change them for this skin.

Im having some difficulty getting the datagrids for the filelist and coverart to work properly, so I'll be focusing on that for next few days.

Karel

DragonK

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Re: New UI1 Orbiter skin
« Reply #56 on: November 26, 2010, 02:08:10 pm »
Hi Guys,

Changed a few things on the HomeMenu.
Still busy with the datagrids, but hopefully I'll have them working by the end of the weekend, or I'll have to ask Thom for help.....  ;D
Thinking im sticking with this frame and color scheme.
Will add the lights and volume buttons to the HomeMenu this weekend to.

Adam, there is no "control" keys on the HomeMenu for the media that is being played, because if you click/press on the cover art it takes you straight to remote screen for that particular media. What are your thoughts?

Karel

totallymaxed

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Re: New UI1 Orbiter skin
« Reply #57 on: November 26, 2010, 03:27:48 pm »
Yes, but we still need to get a functional proof of concept.  Personally I don't think it's even going to happen, not enough people understand our current system, and there's not been any tangible progress on that front in almost a year already.  It's just such a massive undertaking, I don't see it ever happening and see more value in slowly migrating off of what we have already instead of trying to to a full blown overhaul, we really just need a few people do take ownership of it and continue to hammer it out.

Hi all,

There are two efforts going on to update the Orbiter and the UI's we can build for it. The effort that Thom is leading is not intended to immediately deliver a new Orbiter...its an ongoing investigation into some of the 'candidate' underlying technologies that might be used in a future Orbiter. You should not expect the outcome to be a 'shiny' new Orbiter...but it will help us decide what technologies to build a new Orbiter from.

The second effort underway is to build out the technologies and capabilities of the Touch Orbiter and Proxy_orbiter to allow us to deliver new more modern UI's on devices that have a Touch Orbiter implemented on them. In some cases these Touch Orbiters may in the future use some of the technologies that Thom is researching so there may well be significant overalp at the level of the underlying technologies used. For Touch Orbiter we are keen to move towards a way to build UI's that decouples the design process from the underlying technologies used to impliment the 'guts' of the Orbiter. We envisage some kind of xml like representation of each screen and that different Touch Orbiters would render those screens in different ways...so that at one extreme you could impliment an ascii text only Orbiter that would still render the xml correctly on a simple text only LCD display - ie it would be upto the Orbiter to render the screen based on its own physical limitation. At the other extreme we may have a Touch Orbiter on an Android 2.3 Pad that has a beautiful hi-res display or an iPhone4 with a smaller but still hi-res display...both devices have rich UI architectures and UI paradymes that users are already becoming very accustomed too - these devices will render the screens and use the UI capabilities of those devices to the full.

So this work is very much an 'in-progress' effort but I would hope that you will start to see some output from the above efforts early in the new year.

All the best


Andrew
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bongowongo

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Re: New UI1 Orbiter skin
« Reply #58 on: November 26, 2010, 03:46:48 pm »
Yes, but we still need to get a functional proof of concept.  Personally I don't think it's even going to happen, not enough people understand our current system, and there's not been any tangible progress on that front in almost a year already.  It's just such a massive undertaking, I don't see it ever happening and see more value in slowly migrating off of what we have already instead of trying to to a full blown overhaul, we really just need a few people do take ownership of it and continue to hammer it out.

Hi all,

There are two efforts going on to update the Orbiter and the UI's we can build for it. The effort that Thom is leading is not intended to immediately deliver a new Orbiter...its an ongoing investigation into some of the 'candidate' underlying technologies that might be used in a future Orbiter. You should not expect the outcome to be a 'shiny' new Orbiter...but it will help us decide what technologies to build a new Orbiter from.

The second effort underway is to build out the technologies and capabilities of the Touch Orbiter and Proxy_orbiter to allow us to deliver new more modern UI's on devices that have a Touch Orbiter implemented on them. In some cases these Touch Orbiters may in the future use some of the technologies that Thom is researching so there may well be significant overalp at the level of the underlying technologies used. For Touch Orbiter we are keen to move towards a way to build UI's that decouples the design process from the underlying technologies used to impliment the 'guts' of the Orbiter. We envisage some kind of xml like representation of each screen and that different Touch Orbiters would render those screens in different ways...so that at one extreme you could impliment an ascii text only Orbiter that would still render the xml correctly on a simple text only LCD display - ie it would be upto the Orbiter to render the screen based on its own physical limitation. At the other extreme we may have a Touch Orbiter on an Android 2.3 Pad that has a beautiful hi-res display or an iPhone4 with a smaller but still hi-res display...both devices have rich UI architectures and UI paradymes that users are already becoming very accustomed too - these devices will render the screens and use the UI capabilities of those devices to the full.

So this work is very much an 'in-progress' effort but I would hope that you will start to see some output from the above efforts early in the new year.

All the best


Andrew

Like this........
http://www.meegoexperts.com/2010/11/digia-ui-running-lenovo-notebook-nokia-n900/

Hmmmmmm

totallymaxed

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Re: New UI1 Orbiter skin
« Reply #59 on: November 26, 2010, 03:51:36 pm »
Yes, but we still need to get a functional proof of concept.  Personally I don't think it's even going to happen, not enough people understand our current system, and there's not been any tangible progress on that front in almost a year already.  It's just such a massive undertaking, I don't see it ever happening and see more value in slowly migrating off of what we have already instead of trying to to a full blown overhaul, we really just need a few people do take ownership of it and continue to hammer it out.

Hi all,

There are two efforts going on to update the Orbiter and the UI's we can build for it. The effort that Thom is leading is not intended to immediately deliver a new Orbiter...its an ongoing investigation into some of the 'candidate' underlying technologies that might be used in a future Orbiter. You should not expect the outcome to be a 'shiny' new Orbiter...but it will help us decide what technologies to build a new Orbiter from.

The second effort underway is to build out the technologies and capabilities of the Touch Orbiter and Proxy_orbiter to allow us to deliver new more modern UI's on devices that have a Touch Orbiter implemented on them. In some cases these Touch Orbiters may in the future use some of the technologies that Thom is researching so there may well be significant overalp at the level of the underlying technologies used. For Touch Orbiter we are keen to move towards a way to build UI's that decouples the design process from the underlying technologies used to impliment the 'guts' of the Orbiter. We envisage some kind of xml like representation of each screen and that different Touch Orbiters would render those screens in different ways...so that at one extreme you could impliment an ascii text only Orbiter that would still render the xml correctly on a simple text only LCD display - ie it would be upto the Orbiter to render the screen based on its own physical limitation. At the other extreme we may have a Touch Orbiter on an Android 2.3 Pad that has a beautiful hi-res display or an iPhone4 with a smaller but still hi-res display...both devices have rich UI architectures and UI paradymes that users are already becoming very accustomed too - these devices will render the screens and use the UI capabilities of those devices to the full.

So this work is very much an 'in-progress' effort but I would hope that you will start to see some output from the above efforts early in the new year.

All the best


Andrew

Like this........
http://www.meegoexperts.com/2010/11/digia-ui-running-lenovo-notebook-nokia-n900/

Hmmmmmm

Yes any platform or device could be targeted with Touch Orbiter... both the current version or future versions. If the underlying system supports rich UI development then the idea would be to exploit those features inside the Touch Orbiter rather than as we do now which is ignore them.

All the best


Andrew
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CHT Ltd

For Dianemo/LinuxMCE consulting advice;
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Get Dianemo-Rpi2 ARM Licenses http://forum.linuxmce.org/index.php?topic=14026.0

Get RaspSqueeze-CEC or Raspbmc-CEC for Dianemo/LinuxMCE: http://wp.me/P4KgIc-5P

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