Upcoming Skinning Contest (1 Viewer)

[Albert]

The MediaPortal 2 core code is getting more and more stable and we are about to move our development power to the MediaPortal 2 standard plugins.

In a few weeks, we will start a MediaPortal 2 skinning contest where we will publish an exercise to create a skin which follows certain requirements. Everyone can participate. The best ideas will be used in MediaPortal 2 - maybe you can obtain a place in our skinning team?

The main excercise will be to create a complete skin for the existing screens but you can also impress us by presenting good new UI concepts and even better skinning team leadership concepts for our project.

Our MP 2 SkinEngine understands MPF, which is very similar to WPF but especially designed for MediaPortal 2. So if you know WPF, it should be easy for you to work into MPF. But even if you don't understand anything from coding and skinning: If you are a good team leader or if you are able to do the conceptual work, you can also help. As preparation, interested people, who want to take part in a team, should try to form their team before the beginning of the contest. You can also try to form a team in the attached forum thread.

To get started with MediaPortal 2 skinning, please look through our Wiki in the MediaPortal 2 part. It explains how to connect to our SVN server, how to compile the system and how to write plugins and skins. It will be a bit work to get started, but don't despair, the potential and flexibility of the MediaPortal 2 system and especially of the SkinEngine is amazing.

We'll post another news entry here before the competition starts.

 

[rkooten]

Fantastic idea! I'm working on a MP1 skin now, but once I'm done I may have a look at MP2 skinning.

Any successful open source application makes it as easy as possible for the community to improve the software. I haven't looked at the documentation yet, but please try and document as you go. I'm really struggling with MP1 skinning now, just because there's so little documentation and because some things are so inconsistent (like hardcoded <id>'s, labels and no clear distinction beween actions and id's). I'm really hopeful that MP2 will improve on this as you guys won't have to deal with the burden of the MP1 legacy anymore.

Please consider creating coding standards and stimulating people to adhere to those...

Nice to read about the progress you guys are making on MP2 coding as well btw!

 

[craige1]

I vote 1 on massively improving skinning documentation for MP2.

I think one of the biggest reasons why the MP1 documentation on skinning is the way it is, is that the programmers who write the skinning engine and controls think that other people will somehow know how they work. Please, get the coders who write the skinning engine to also document how to use it . I see this as an important step to getting MP2 adopted as quickly as possible by the community(plugin devs and skiners) when it is released.

 

[bberger]

Please try to choose something that doesn't look like a kid's game (Blue3 e.g.) - a very minimalistic and imho nice skin _IF_ you know MP is a good bunch of SW. I've heard many arguments contra MP and pro XBMC just because of Confluence as a standard skin.. many people don't know how to install another skin or are too afraid of doing it..

MediaStream as a Standard-Skin would be nice btw.

 

[Albert]

AW: Re: Upcoming Skinning Contest

I vote 1 on massively improving skinning documentation for MP2.

Which parts exactly of the MP2 skinning docs do you want us to improve? Please be specific.
Perhaps you know, we don't have a huge, well-paied docs team like Microsoft which just can perfect any available docs. To help us, it will be necessary to get more involved and also to take a deeper look into all available resources than just relying on pure docs.

 

[tourettes]

Re: AW: Re: Upcoming Skinning Contest

Perhaps you know, we don't have a huge, well-paied docs team like Microsoft which just can perfect any available docs.

Just to note that even money doesn't get always good documentation. Just check DirectShow / MediaFoundation ones

 

[Baboonanza]

Remember that the Microsoft WPF documentation covers most of the skinning info and it doesn't need duplicating. Animations, brushes, control interfaces can all be found there. To some degree normal WPF can also be used to do layouts and test some stuff outside of MP2.

Personally I would like to see a clearer explanation of Workflow states. I've read the documentation in the Wiki and I still can't figure out how it works even with ready access to the code! I appeciate it might be difficult to explain but it's a pretty crucial thing to both skinners and plugin writers to understand IMO.

And my uber-beginners tip: Look at the theme files. All the look-and-feel of the skin is defined there with the actual window screens containing broader layout stuff.

 

[Albert]

AW: Upcoming Skinning Contest

I just added a link in the concepts section of the DevelopersSystemDocumentation to describe the Workflow concept. That page was previously linked under the UI services section as "WorkflowManager", but in fact, it describes the concept. I'll revise the docs the next days.

 

[da-anda]

I'm not sure if a skinning contest as I understood your intention is a good start in first place. Although it would be nice to see some skins available on release of MP2, I'd personally perfer only one skin that's really good instead of several lousy ones (don't mean to offend anybody here). So maybe the contest should not incorporate full working skins, but just wireframes, mockups and UI concepts instead. Users then can vote for those in different categories (like general appealing, ui-concept, features) and after that form a skinning team out of the contest winners, add some core devs to the team, call a team-leader and create a fantastic default skin for mediaPortal. That's how I would do it.

As it just came to my mind when talking about skins. PLEASE change the way the handling of skin files works (if not done already). It really sucks if you install a plugin and your skin doesn't support it. There should not be the need for a skin to support certain plugins, nor to copy any XML files to skin directories - this is not userfriendly at all. Plugins should provide default skin files so that they work in any case. If a skin then is providing a optimized version for a plugin, use this one - if not, fall back to the default MP skin files or the plugins generic skin file.
If you need some more conceptual ideas/help - let me know

 

[Albert]

AW: Re: Upcoming Skinning Contest

As it just came to my mind when talking about skins. PLEASE change the way the handling of skin files works (if not done already). It really sucks if you install a plugin and your skin doesn't support it. There should not be the need for a skin to support certain plugins, nor to copy any XML files to skin directories - this is not userfriendly at all. Plugins should provide default skin files so that they work in any case. If a skin then is providing a optimized version for a plugin, use this one - if not, fall back to the default MP skin files or the plugins generic skin file.

Thanks for that very good idea, but I think you borrowed it from me two years ago ;-) MP2 exactly works that way...