BaseSkin and Appearance Integration

[DangerMouse]

Just a thought, but the developers of BaseSkin and Appearance Manager appear to be making huge inroads into what is fundamentally the same problem. How about a bit of collaberation to make one "super" solution?

[Old Dog]

It may be that such a "super" solution is already evolving. For example, look at Fatman_do's Chameleon skin. Fatman has taken the graphics images concept suggested in BaseSkin and simply relocated the actual files to the AM ButtonSets directory so that AM can do the file copies at runtime. Maybe AM should change the name of this directory from ButtonSets to something like DynamicGraphics.

An example is I copied all chameleon's default listbuttons and other images, besides the backgrounds, into the AM ButtonSets Chameleon_default directory. That way, no matter what changes I do down the road, selecting the default buttons restores all buttons, listboxes, tv grid, ect. to the default (an example of this in action is in the latest chameleon release).

Appearance Manager's focus is on enhancing the end-user experience by allowing them to manipulate the skin at runtime with a remote control. It would be nice if AM were extended to include selection over more elements of the skin, for example...

Hopefully Old Dog will add more flexibility to the AM so I can add more support for it.
Today it is the ButtonSets function, that have a similar function that I use, except that my theme change functionality with batch files can change the main menu, the baseskin.xml the OSDs and the panels, task images and the rest of the images + update buttons and list view stuff for BlueMCE2 resoureces. I don't want to maintain lots of XML files That take too much time, so a skin would die because I don't have the time.
I focus on high quality and flexilble XML files instead. The BaseSkin is more a flexible XML design, not a skin with a grapical design.

Selection of the MainMenu.xml and the BaseSkin.xml files would be excellent enhancements. Unfortunately, I don't see a way to provide the necessary feedback to the end-user at this time.