Thread: Working on a new skin, easy to read, easy to use

I am working on a simple easy to read, easy to use skin, here's what I have so far.
Beta release coming very soon! (Hopefully before the end of October)

UPDATE - I finished the bulk of the work on this skin, but it will be posted in a new thread due to enough changes in the design. This will be considered version 0, and the actual release will be version 1.0. I just have to make sure the folder is complete and the fonts are included... that will be up tonight (10/22/07)

One thing that I want to update is the screens with the big buttons (the main screen or audio screens) have a larger radius for the corners, whereas the other buttons are more square. I am going to make the big buttons more squared to match the theme better.

Also, as requested, this will be redone in .png format (eventually) so that different backgrounds can be used. (although I think that just complicates the look and negates the theory of having an easy to read skin.)

hAv!c CONCEPT:


Main Menu working:



Common Menu: (accessible from any sub-skin, only the middle two columns of buttons compose the menu.)


Audio Player: (moved the text in a little bit, 5 pixels was right.)


Audio Browser:


GPS: (This shows what skins that need a little more screen space for the embedded application will look like; video player, launch, etc.)


Weather: (I really like this one for some reason)


Skin Browser:


Application Launcher:


There will be only a few different images, making the total impact on your hard drive very small, less than a few MB, and the user can also customize where they want certain buttons, text color, etc fairly easily without photoshop. All the text and icons are actually just labels, and a few of them are a custom font I made that will be released with the skin. If you don't install the font I made, the labels show up wierd. If anyone has any ideas for other symbols to use, please post a sketch here, and I will try and implement it in the font so that you can place it anywhere on my skin.

My thinking with this skin is to make something that is very simple, yet does all the things I need it to. I still wanted something that looked pretty nice too though. All the master skinners out there are making some really nice skins, and I appreciate the inspiration they've given me, and other skinners here. I just wanted something solid that works every time, with not really any extra set up.

I am calling it hAv!c because my other skins were based on the Pioneer Avic nav systems for inspiration, and this skin uses some elements from those skins, but no longer anything from the pioneer avic systems, so it's a h(acked)avic skin in semi-1337 speek.

If there's a certain feature that you want implemented, send me a link to an example skin and I can try to get it going for you.

Also, this is fairly customizable, if you want play and pause to be in a different spot, then open the skin in the editor and reassign the button. The images don't have any labels or icons encoded to them.

Enjoy!