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

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.

Simple and elegant...

Kind of a cross between PSP and Apple...

Does this mean you guys will not be developing XBMC live?

give us a beta version, please

you can use gif's if you want, but they use up too much memory which is why too many people don't use them.

Man, its been a while
Team BB, are you guys still alive? Hows things going?

Blackbolt went mad and I had to shoot him. then I shot myself (talking from the grave)

if it makes you feel any better mc360 has had 113 changes to its source since the last public version with lots of major ones

Just out of curiosity, how do you guys afford all this? i mean the work on the skins the man hours and other stuff? Does your team get paid or they just do it b/c they cool like that?

You guys rule, without you the xbox would suck.

What do you mean afford? There is nothing to afford. Everything we do is free. Its a hobby for us all, the only thing I could say was a gain financially is the donations, which was very sub par considering the coverage the website has had and the download numbers, we barely have enough to buy our own domain, which I hope to do soon.

As I mentioned previously, we don't need to pay for anything at this point. We are a team of dedicated coders and artists that do what we do because we love doing it, we don't do it for gain and we certainly don't do it for money. Yes it has taken alot of our free time up, but its happily spent. I admit its been a pain in the arse sometimes, especially before we released our very first beta, but its totally been worth it and I am happy I ever did it.

Another idea is to have custom music playing in the background like in unleashx. Would that apply to the skin or does it have to do xbmc?

If I load this when it comes out do I need to still patch my bios for vga support ???