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Thursday 20th December 2007
Team Blackbolt's Next Project: XBMC Skin 'EX'
With 2007 almost to a close, its getting pretty obvious that our previously announced next project 'EX' will not be being released during its previous 'Holiday 2007' slot. This is mainly due to myself (Blackbolt) not having as much free time as I've previously had. Also, the team is pretty much just myself now. Jezz_X continues to maintain the current skins on the SVN, but there is no active development happening amongst the team as everyone is off doing their own projects.
The XBMC skin EX is still being worked on by myself and I very much plan to release it as soon as its ready for public consumption. Progress has been slow, but hopefully with the start of 2008 it will pick up. The design plan for the entire skin is almost locked down and all that will remain is the task of making everything work together and polishing it all up. The main focus of the skin is still to be used as a media center and its very much a HD centric user interface, built for Widescreen 720p.
Although I don't have any beta versions available for people to download, I am willing to show off the homescreen as of this weekend. The previous 3 icon layout was proving to feel too 'zoomed' in and so I recently bumped it up to 5 icons and thus it has a much better feeling while moving around. If you click the preview image below you can get a full 720p resolution image of the home screen.
I will be bringing you more updates as and when development picks up for this skin as I'm just as eager as everyone else who's waiting to get it finished. I wish everyone a happy holiday and I hope to bring you more good news in the new year.
Peace.
- Blackbolt
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Friday 27th October 2006
Blackbolt 'eX' XBMC Skin for 2007
As we mentioned in an earlier news post, the next skin developed by Team Blackbolt will be called 'eX' and will be for XBMC Exclusively. The entire theme behind the skin is elgancy, simplicity and no words! There will be as little wording as possible, you will see the filenames of your files, the settings menus will obviously have words in them, but the rest of the skin will feature simple icons that will display the info for that button. If you have thumbnails for your movies or folders, these will overwrite the text description for the filename and you will see the thumbnail only.
An elegant Black Gloss look has been determined and with the help of the Xbox-Scene XBMC Skinning forum users. Some concepts have been developed and a final look has still to be decided, but it will look alot like the preview images below. With the current time plan for MC360's production decided, eX will start coding and artwork early 2007 after a deserved break from Skinning. MC360 has been in production since December 29th 2005 from concept to finalisation. You can expect MC360 1.0 Build later this year. Thank you to all X-S forum users for their Ideas and help with ideas for eX, its looking like its going to be a breath of fresh air.
Click for a Full Size 720p resolution screenshot.
Team Blackbolt's Next Xbmc Skin: Ex, News Update: 20th December 2007
Oct 27 2006, 04:11 PM
