Thread: Serious question about front ends and their visuals...

Originally Posted by Tengis

Here is my beef with ALL of the front ends EXCEPT Streetdeck:
Where are the animations? Where are the animated backgrounds?

A friend and I have been working on a project or two involving carputers. I have tried and looked at quite a few front ends and almost none of them seem usable except for Centrafuse and Streetdeck because of animations alone. We have a few issues with Streetdeck but no matter what we have tried we always go back to it. We are really looking forward to seeing what the new version of Centrafuse is all about.

Streetdeck is the only professional IMPRESSIVE looking front end I have seen so far that is usable. The animated background alone makes it worth it. I see Riderunner mentioned on various forums all over the place... I have not seen one professional looking skin anywhere for Riderunner. Tons of other front ends almost seem like a joke once I downloaded and installed them.

Main questions (besides the two at the top):
What are some "professional" looking front ends besides Streetdeck and Centrafuse?
Are any of the Linux based front ends professional looking?
My friend is a great graphic designer - what are some very usable front ends that support animations and could potentially be skinned to look great? Im hoping not to sift through anymore garbage.

Ever take a look at OpenMobile?
Professional: Check
Linux: Check(also windows, mac, and soon android)
Skinning: Fully supported and encouraged

Hop on over to the OpenMobile Forum and check it out.

Yup, I have to agree with you. StreetDeck and CF are probably the only professional looking front ends that doesnt look like it was slapped together in mspaint. RR doesnt look great out of the box, but if you have the time to customize it, it can also look great. Havent really check out OpenMobile, but as of now I dont really know of any Linux front ends that has the same professional feel that CF or SD does. As for the lack of animations, that doesnt bug me too much, but if you look at the youtube preview for CF3 youll see that there are animations.

Is there a working version of Openmobile right now? Is there any information on creating a skin for it?

The last release was an alpha so it really doesn't show off much of the potential of the project. Heres the project page which includes a link to the wiki and a download link for the old version:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openmobile/

The next version is a beta which also means all of the important parts are complete. Should be finished in the next few weeks (I've learned to be conservative with release dates). All of the code is up to date on the svn server but that probably wont help you unless your a c# developer.

Take a look at the wiki for all the design philosophy stuff as well as how to skin and feel free to post in the forums with questions and/or comments. There is a skin designer available but its clunky and was more of a POC-the next version is a full skin designer and plugin IDE; remind me later in the week if your interested and I can release it early (its done just waiting for the rest of the project to be released).

I'm sure as a SD user u've seen my work all over their forums-its taken a lot of work to get to this point but I can honestly say this makes SD look like something a little kid did with crayons.

RevFE supports window animations, and in Linux it uses compiz animations when you switch windows, but it doesn't have any good skins atm, or any at all that take advantage of the built in animation support so it looks fairly silly. It's still in the very early stages though, barely into beta.