In addition to changing the look and feel of the UI, is it possible to slightly change some functionality? As an example, can you create a UI where after you watch a video instead of it just exiting have it go to a menu where you can exit or delete the video? How about the ability to go straight into TV shows which are treated slightly different from movies? Or for an even bigger change, how about the ability to do a unique sort on titles, and for those titles with multiple files (multiple episodes of a TV series for example), have the multiple episodes show up in a separate slide out list or show on a separate screen if the main title is selected?
background skip if not interested: My wife is getting frustrated with LinuxMCE. She's pretty open to new things and recognizes the potential, but lets face it, LinuxMCE can be cumbersome. I tried to show her some sorting/playlist tricks from Thom's webcast (thanks again), so I grabbed my GoMouse, pulled up videos, selected TV Shows, picked Chelsey Lately (she was on a business trip for 6 weeks and has a ton to catch up on), clicked title to show all Chelsey Latelys, went to play all, brought up the menu and chose Manage Playlists, gave it a name, saved it, then tried to explain how easy that is and now she just needs to choose playlist from the menu, pick the playlist I just created, and it will play them one at a time picking up where it last left off. In the end, instead of showing her how "simple" it is, I reinforced how painful it is for her to simply catch up her shows. She called me in a little later because she was having trouble deleting the old shows and watching new ones. Back and forth from screen to screen, and when you click a video then delete it, it takes you back to the video screen but there is a bit of lag so the video you just deleted still shows up and if you try to play it you get a file not found error.
Don't take this the wrong way, I'm a big LMCE fan and I realize it's still fairly new with growing features and continuous improvement. I'm also not complaining or demanding someone fix it, just pointing out that most of us here are are techie types (I've been doing Unix Admin work since 1990 and I'm sure long time IT people are pretty common here) so what seems simple or reasonable to us just doesn't work well for more casual non-tech types who want to just grab a remote and start watching without a learning curve. As much as I want to avoid the current HA Designer, I'm willing to give it a shot if it's possible to change the way some stuff works without actual programming. Of course I plan to follow Thom's guide as well as his requirements, then share it if I manage to come up with something usable.
