NXE – Themes 2.0 and Friends Channel Posted by XanTium | September 26 17:51 EST | News Category: Xbox360

From the Xbox PR Blog: [QUOTE] Ahhh Themes - There's been a lot of chatter about whether or not you can keep what you have, how they will look and how the new stuff will be different. We'll be tackling all of that today so pay attention! Also in this week's Developer Diaries, we're going to show you more on the new Friends Channel - another area we got a lot of questions about after we first showed it to you at E3. This fall, themes are getting even more detailed with the New Xbox Experience. Themes will take over more than just the background of your Dashboard - they will be present on every channel in cool, dynamic ways. Yes, I said, "DYNAMIC." Check out the screens that show the Underground Theme on the Dashboard and the Friends Channel. Every graphic on each channel will tie into your theme and change if you choose a different one. You can really see this on the Friends Channel - each of your friends' Avatars will stand next to a different graphic or environment. These graphics will match the theme you choose and will change dynamically as you navigate from channel to channel. But that's not all; the themes will be subtly animated. This is some pretty cool stuff when you see it. This is what your Dashboard and Friends Channel would look like with the Signature Theme - picture the bubbles in the background moving, shrinking, growing - you get the idea. Also on the Friends Channel, you'll be able to see your friends' Avatars rally when you host a LIVE party. You can see who is online and offline by what their Avatars are doing, too. Online? Your friends will emote and be able to wave you over to jump into their party. Offline? Well, they're snoozing, of course. Finally (and many of you have asked us about this) don't worry - you can still use the themes you previously purchased with the New Xbox Experience. They'll look even better over the new UI, especially in high-definition. Below is what a current "Gears of War" theme would look like this. [/QUOTE]

Is my photograph of the Heathrow Express station from the very edge of the platform going to 'subtly animate'?

I'd be very surprised.

Sorry, Microsoft, but I just can't share your enthusiasm.

I like the new themes:





I hope they have more "styles" to pick from.


I like that back alley, police thing. I hope we can buy those kinda of themed skins.

The way people always seem to come here and moan about everything soon the name will be changed to negative-scene.

I find what MS has done is really good the old dash looked very dated and clearly people are happy with that style on the Wii so why moaning for 360 which has far better functions.

At the end of the day it's a games console if you don't want to play games then just don't bother with it the other bits are a bonus.

I think this is lookig nicer and nicer the more they show us. I'm looking forward to it.

i REALLY dont like it

well, some people don't need a fancy-schmanzy wii clone, they like the way the current dash is and don't feel the need for unnecessary change, they feel Microsoft should add more functionality instead.
eg: now they're selling the chatpad for text input in Messenger or friends, why not add a browser with no access to the HDD? basically a live-running browser so all cookies and such are just temporarily stored in the ram, or just give the browser access to a single cache file on the HDD and keep it away from the rest of the drive?

or maybe FINALLY improve codec support for the media center extender?

Microsoft should have allowed people to choose between the NXE ui and the classic UI, not put the classic ui in the guide and yet again force their decisions on their costumers.

I personally like it, the old one is so slow and dated. I really want to know what are they going to do with


the already downloaded gamerpics?

I like the new dash, let's wait to see it for ourselves..

I dont see how they are saying old themes are going to look better when they are cutting the bottom half of the theme off.

Just saw the GOW over the new dash and OMG how horrendous it looks. Taking a hardcore shooting game and blending it with a kiddie style dash. There is actually no middle ground at all between the two.

Now if they designed the dash to work with the users preferences, I could see this being a very "Eye Candy" style dash. Design the dash around the theme of the users liking. Lets say the GOW theme as posted. Put in user or predefined characters and have the foreground and back ground work together, then you have something that would be more appealing.

All I can say is "thank doG" that the main function of the 360 is not to look at the dash for extended periods of time.

800 points for an old theme, 18000 points for a NXE theme, haha just kiding,

Ill never buy themes, I rather put the money to a game!!

Seriously, I have yet to see something visually that will blow me away in NXE, the party feature is the only thing I am excited about.

Not turning into a bashing thread but since I own a PS3 as well I'm very excited for home than NXE. I watched a video of Home today and it seriously looks amazing. And I still laugh if Sony released Home earlier (prob wont happen but lol). It's a 0.98 not far away!

That is exactly what first came to my mind with these screenshots. I'm glad I'm not the only one that feels the same way. It looks/would look more sleek without the "360 globe" surface.

so if i get a theme with girls in the background, would they be animated too?

You really want IE7 on the 360? Yah no thx.....

dude, no lol.
I want something well locked-down, no plugins allowed(we don't want the bonzibuddy on our 360 eh ), built-in flash and silverlight player and such.
it would make the 360 a much more powerful platform.

besides, IE7 isn't so bad, IE5 and 6 were monsters but with 7 Microsoft put IE back on the map.
not that I use IE7 though, I like Firefox' add-on flexibility too much.

If it's sandboxed (like every other app on the whole entire platform), plugins won't matter.

Break your browser? Just reboot and remove the plugin.

Anyhoo, the Wii has a decent browser. Shame Microsoft only copied the crap bits of the Wii.

precisely, sandboxed, the browser should only get RAM access or perhaps very limited HDD access, only to a sort of paging file and no ability do download files other than the webpages themselves.
heck, if one dedicated person can make a browser like Linksbox, how couldn't MS make a simple, light browser for the 360 that doesn't have ridiculous amounts of security leaks?

then once the browser comes out all we will here is whining about how it doesnt play flash, how java does work, why cant i ftp to my wii, i cant read the text, blah blah blah........

lol, then I'll tell them: you want to play flash stuff and visit sites that are unprofessionally made in flash, get a gorram computer or hack your 360 for linux
for the browser, I just mean: if they integrate Windows Live Messenger in the dashboard, why not windows Live Mail or even a darn browser too?

Every app on the whole entire platform is already sandboxed from every other. The worst, crappiest, buggiest web browser in the world could no more mess up your Halo saves than you could factor a 4096-bit number.



Linksbox is a port of links, which has a list of authors and contributors over five pages long. All that 'one dedicated person' did was make an XDK port of the win32 version. Which is a lot of work, but is orders of magnitude short of a whole entire web browser.