[mythtv-users] Animated themes?

[Justin Hornsby]

Pardon me for saying this, but I resent the implication that all the 
hard work themers put in on their (static) themes is leaving out blingy 
animation because of something we've ignored or overlooked :)

As Paul said, there's a lot of dormant code in mythui just waiting to be 
unleashed.  If that could be done by merely tweaking an xml file or two 
I'd have been all over it by now believe me!  Sadly there's a fair bit 
more involved - namely porting existing ui code over to the new mythui 
classes.  Work started on that in mythtv's menus and some plugins but 
there's a heck of a lot left to do.  Rest assured that I want to have 
something to do with it as soon as I know how - but it's definitely in 
the pipeline from other developers.

Flashy effects like buttons moving around the screen & jiggling about 
are all very well and good (and for that read slashdottable/diggable) 
but at the end of the day what really counts is functionality, ease of 
use & speed of operation.  I've seen more than one 'smooth' UI with 
rotating this, that & the other and frankly it didn't take long to get 
bored with waiting for things to stop moving so I could see what was 
going on.  Not to mention that more than one such UI only progresses to 
a selected item once movement has stopped.

So yes, please let's have some 'bling' in the UI but for Pete's sakes 
let's not slow anything down and above all, keep it optional :)  I'd use 
the opengl painter for everyday operation if I was a big fan of the fade 
between screens (but I'm not) so I only use it for testing theme work 
for now.

'Bling' aside, there's going to be a lot of good to come out of the 
mythui porting work - not least of which a big effort to bring a lot 
more commonality to mythtv's features in terms of look & feel.  IMHO we 
need that more than spinning/zooming icons.

That's my $0.02

Justin