Thread: An Open Source, Fast and Modular, C# Front End

What you are doing is veri nice, but culd you integrate an OBDII Software (ex.AB-COM,OP-COM) software what is working with homemade testers.Or it is posible to expand this soft to integrate gauges and stuff like that.??? sorry for my Englis. THX

Originally Posted by NSFW

I lean pretty heavily toward having a home screen with buttons for only the most-used features, plus a 'more' button for less-used features.

http://imgur.com/bdGb0.jpg <== like this
http://i30.tinypic.com/xm5xeu.jpg <== or this, but I'd want play/pause/ff/rew & volume added

Yea im a big fan of that first one too....the only thing is those app buttons get pretty small on a 7" screen

Originally Posted by NSFW

That said, if the app is fully skinnable, shouldn't skin development be pretty much independent of code development? Ideally, skin devs could do their artwork with whatever layouts and functionality they envision (within the constraints of what the FE is capable of, of course), and then tie the artwork to the code with XML files, or something like that.

Yea very true....but which style we go with will effect design of the rendering engine. Ex: If we go with full buttons (icon and text) that have a reflection in front the rendering engine will need to be able to reflect the button and text. If its just an icon...the icon itself can contain the reflection.

UnusuallyGenius: That was fast. Considering you started from a pretty bad mockup - that looks great. I like the popup date idea too. Only two things I can think of - can you do a volume icon in the top left and then shift the album art? (that should complete the four corners concept). And with the media bar, add some type of position slider kind of thing just above the buttons.

Scrum again: http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/product-backlog

Basically you put all the features into a backlog on paper / text file / spreadsheet / whatever, and rank them by value to the user. You could have a great FE without rendering reflections, so supporting reflections would be a way down the list. Even making the decision of whether that should be supported, would be way down the list.

Were it my project (and I realize it's not ), I'd start by making a 'home screen' that launches external apps for every button, and does that well. As a bonus, you can kinda check off the navigation and OBD2 features at that point since there are good 3rd-party apps for those. Then finish the phone plugin, and get that working really well. The the music plugin. Every time you finish a task, you move on to do whatever is at the top of the backlog (which will grow over time as new feature ideas come up, and will get shuffled a bit as users learn what the issues are).

Originally Posted by UnusuallyGenius

Here is my first concept based on the information given ...

That's cool stuff!

Originally Posted by NSFW

That said, if the app is fully skinnable, shouldn't skin development be pretty much independent of code development? Ideally, skin devs could do their artwork with whatever layouts and functionality they envision (within the constraints of what the FE is capable of, of course), and then tie the artwork to the code with XML files, or something like that.

Bingo.