Mailing List Archive: MythTV: Users

Animated themes?

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arjan at anymore

Jan 14, 2008, 7:29 AM

Post #1 of 5 (854 views)
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Animated themes?

Hi,
As I'm new to MythTV and I can't find anything on the web about animated
themes, here's my question: are there any?
Is it even possible to have animated themes yet? I mean animated
backgrounds and menu items.
And perhaps animated (I mean really animated, as opposed to OpenGL
fades) switching between menus?
Please correct me if this question is really stupid.
Regards,
Arjan
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kuphal at dls

Jan 14, 2008, 7:33 AM

Post #2 of 5 (781 views)
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Re: Animated themes? [In reply to]

On Jan 14, 2008 9:29 AM, Arjan Schrijver <arjan [at] anymore> wrote:

> Hi,
> As I'm new to MythTV and I can't find anything on the web about animated
> themes, here's my question: are there any?
> Is it even possible to have animated themes yet? I mean animated
> backgrounds and menu items.
> And perhaps animated (I mean really animated, as opposed to OpenGL
> fades) switching between menus?
> Please correct me if this question is really stupid.

Yes, check out MePo-Wide as an example

http://home.comcast.net/~zdzisekg/

I believe it has animations (and is a very nice theme)

Kevin

mythtv at dsl

Jan 14, 2008, 11:12 AM

Post #3 of 5 (776 views)
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Re: Animated themes? [In reply to]

Arjan Schrijver wrote:
> Hi,
> As I'm new to MythTV and I can't find anything on the web about animated
> themes, here's my question: are there any?
> Is it even possible to have animated themes yet? I mean animated
> backgrounds and menu items.
> And perhaps animated (I mean really animated, as opposed to OpenGL
> fades) switching between menus?
> Please correct me if this question is really stupid.
> Regards,
> Arjan
>
>
Not really at the moment you can have animated icons but that is all.

I was playing about with the new UI code over Christmas mainly because I
was a bit ignorant of the new UI code and what is needed to be looked at
to get it finished. I started looking at ways to animate things just to
get a feel for the code and updated the base UIType, which all the UI
widgets inherit from, so you could animate both it's size and position
and soon had the images zooming in and out and zipping about the screen
in the themed menus. For example it allowed you to animate the watermark
images in the menus when you scrolled up or down the menus so they could
either zoom into view or slide in from somewhere or a combination of the
two. Bearing in mind this was Christmas and I might have had a few I was
thinking this is great!! but now I'm sober I'm not so sure ;-) You soon
get bored with it.

Anyway I'm not really the person to entrust making UI changes like this
since I'm only to well aware my theming and UI skills are non existent!
MythArchive's UI is always being slagged of :-( mostly by fellow devs
stuartm and justinh on irc I believe ;-)

I might take another look later after the 0.21 release. If anyone has
some ideas of how the interface should be animated let me know.

Paul H.
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justin at mythtvthemes

Jan 14, 2008, 1:57 PM

Post #4 of 5 (763 views)
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Re: Animated themes? [In reply to]

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
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myth at dgreaves

Jan 16, 2008, 5:49 AM

Post #5 of 5 (745 views)
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Re: Animated themes? [In reply to]

Justin Hornsby wrote:
> '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.

Yes, like not having to navigate down several menus and then back up several
menus, page through loads of pages, back down the menus, back up the menus and

"Sweetheart, do you prefer this de-interlace option?"

"Hmm, show me the other one again"

"NOOOOO!!! DIE BITCH!!!!"

David

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