Step One

The first thing I want to get out of the way, is the easy part, the GUI.

I want to create custom controls for every aspect of this project as to create my own look and feel.

Now the first question, how do I want my menu interface to operate? The first concept I came up with was something similar to the Xbox360's menu, with expanding tabs from left to right. But this quickly posed a problem... it consumes a lot of real-estate and the first experiments proved to have exceptional lag in trying to render them as they transition between collapsed and expanded. The idea was wonderful but the concept had to be scrapped at least for the main display, I may continue to use this feature in the options dialog later as when they are in the collapsed state they consume very little space and as long as there are not lots of sub-menu items then clutter doesn't become a large concern.

The idea I ended up settling on was a basic button layout. With a single column of buttons on the left-hand side of the screen listing all of the main features. This may prove to be easier for IR remotes to handle too, in the end. Upon clicking on any of the main features (video player, audio player, picture browser, etc... a new dialog appears adjacent to the button that is just a basic item list of all of the valid files and directories from that button's root folder.

I've also decided to place a mini-player and description box on the right-hand side of the screen. So that when an item is selected from the list box on the other side the mini-player will begin to preview the item and display any relevant information about it, such as the file name, duration, file size, etc...

As you can also see from the first two screen shots, for the most part I've got the theme related coding done. You can as of this point already, go into the options dialog and change any color that you see displayed in either two screens. I'm thinking about coding in actual themes though. That way the user doesn't have worry about what colors he or she wants for the background and what colors they want on buttons, they can just select a pre-defined theme and off they go. If you are wondering this theme that I'm currently using is mostly Azure-Steel Blue-Midnight Blue.