May I know if JRiver has any policy/plans to actually do anything with the theater view skinning features?
I was wondering why so few TV skins over here; after all is just xml and Photoshop, and people proved there's a lot of skills around with the Standard skins. Let's make something new. I was in for some surprise.
- the documentation (wiki) is 3 years old, probably before the time when the whole skinning thing was split between main.xml and base.xml
- same wiki was put together after a user's post, who seem to have reverse engineered everything by trial and error - exasperation style - hence various notes of "I don't know what it does". Neither do I. It helped a bit in the beginning. Thanks LanceD wherever you are, we haven't seen you in 5 months.
- it might be just me but the xml use has a style rather interesting. Everytime I see the likes of Name="" I appreciate the making of everything very clear. I ended commenting lines heavily so I'd know where I am, what am I doing.
- The best of all things: everything except a paint job is locked down. What we would be doing here is not skinning is more like modding/wildly guessing. So, pretty please, allow elements to be defined, not having to push them around by second or third variables.
I've already kicked the skinning options as far as they go. Tried to be creative - forced elements to be where they usually don't go (top rollers in the middle of the screen was fun for 30 seconds), skins designed for fixed resolutions (say 1920x1080 so you can create graphics that stay put since otherwise you have no control over), portions of code moved between sections, etc.
My conclusion is that currently is not worth the time to push too hard since the tools are missing. And yes I'm of the opinion that releasing (control over) some items is not enough. All or nothing.
In practical / commercial terms. You have to have a face for Theater View. Which in present times has to be wicked cool, not just good. The "alternatives" lack the power of MC but their 10ft interfaces... They attract the most people. So if we could have full specs and control over Theater View skinning we can unleash one more thing to keep everybody glued to their TV sets with MC
.
Author
Topic: Theater View Skinning - where to? (Read 2052 times)