brave [little] meme

Anyone familiar with XBMC, the Xbox Media Centre project, or its mac spinoff Plex is likely to be acquainted with a little skin called Aeon. Released years ago but never ultimately completed, Aeon set a new vision for what XBMC could achieve in terms of user experience. 

As he prepares for the release of his latest skinning project, code-named Stark, Aeon’s creator Duncan Harris (better known as djh) has kindly taken some time out to share some insights on his work, as well as a few tantalising hints as to what users might expect in future.

Q: The release of the Aeon skin made you somewhat of a legend within the XBMC community. Despite never making it beyond alpha, Aeon and its various mods are still in widespread use by both XBMC and Plex users.

A: I think you might be exaggerating a bit there, at least as far as the first bit goes. Still, it’s nice to get so many kind words via email and the guestbook. Weird, though, as people are obviously referring to a version of Aeon I wouldn’t touch with a bargepole now. I just hope the new version doesn’t disappoint them – that’d be typical.

Q: What was it that initially motivated you to get into the skinning game?

A: The best motivators of all: frustration and impatience. Too much time spent hopping between one media centre and another and thinking, “Is this it?” It goes right back to Winamp and its library view, which never worked the way I wanted it to and bugged me something rotten. Even worse is when you find the app that does everything you want bar one really important thing. That’s how it was with the XBMC interface. In my job, you come to realise there are far too many commentators and precious few doers; I’m just doing my bit to make things work a little better, I suppose. 

Q: Why XBMC?

A: Man, why not XBMC? It’s incredible. Granted, it had a head start by being on Xbox where you could just pick up the pad and play with it, but it’s carried that robustness over to HTPC which is clearly where it belongs. From my angle, it’s obviously the skinning engine that’s the big draw – I’ve never seen anything like it in an app of this kind. People joke that the imagination is the only limit with that thing, but it really is true. That’s a great motivator right there: knowing that if you dream something up while you’re walking down the street, you can build it in just a few hours. 

Being open source is a key factor as well. I’ve seen enough interest in Aeon to know that everyone wants to jump on the HTPC bandwagon, but as soon as money’s involved you’re in shit town. It can’t do this, it can’t do that; so-and-so has to have its logo here; we need advertising there; this format’s a threat to our security; we can’t monetise such-and-such. Fuck it. No matter what the big boys come up with, XBMC will flatten it. Or at least it will if it has the looks, which is where us skinning bods come in.

Q: How has your real-life background influenced your design style? What would you say would be your major sources of inspiration?

A: Well, I work in games – or around them – so I see a new user interface every day. That counts for something, I guess. So when you go from looking at a Codemasters interface to something far less attractive for a media centre, you start asking questions. That’s really all I have as far as inspiration goes; I’m no artist. I should give credit to Mathias Mahling, though, the guy who did the original XBMC interfaces, and Smokehead (whatever his real name is) who did an older skin called “Clearity”. That was the first sign that XBMC was poised for better things. And I had a (too-) brief partnership with Emilio Ayala, a graphic designer from NYC who has tremendous vision when it comes to this kind of thing. He’s a genius. I can’t thank him enough.

Q: What’s your core design philosophy?

A: This is where I try not to sound like a dick and usually fail. In short, it’s about making stuff like movies and music real again. So you’ve had years of MP3 and now digital video steadily killing off the optical formats like CD and DVD, which themselves stripped much of the art from vinyl and VHS. Well, maybe not VHS, but you see the point. No one has any stuff anymore. We used to dedicate little corners of our homes to the things that inspired us, and now we have a bunch of files on a computer that no one will ever see. Great. So if I have any design philosophy it’s simply: enough is enough.

People harp on about Apple and the iPod ruining things like cover art, but in a lot of ways they’ve saved it. And they introduced real world textures to their interfaces, which went some way to creating a kind of “virtual collection”. Aeon’s all about taking that to its ultimate form, celebrating taste through things like backdrops, fanart, and user customisation.

Actually, I may as well ride my high horse while I’m on it. One thing that really drives the web side of things – the Aeon site and all the free backdrops, which trust me have consumed a fair bit of time and money – is the way Microsoft stiffed everyone with the user customization side of Xbox 360. After all that talk of how it would cater to “the remix generation”, all it amounts to are these trivial “gamer pics” and garish themes, few of which you can preview, all of which must be paid for. That’s shit, no matter what the financial needs. 

Q: How do usability and ease of use factor in your design choices?

A: They have to factor quite heavily, right? It’s one of those 49/51 ratio things: which do you prioritise out of usability and looks? They’re both as important as each other, but there’ll always come a crunch where you have to choose one over the other, and usability must always win.

Q: What were you primarily trying to achieve with your first effort, Aeon?

A: A statement of intent, I guess. I had a vision of what it should be from the start, and it’s the same one I stick to now. So I needed to communicate that and see if people took to it, and then think about making it work. Actually, I’m lying a bit there. The primary goal was entirely selfish: I just wanted all my stuff to look nice. But one thing quickly overtook the other and that’s why I’m still here doing it.

Q: Were you satisfied with how Aeon turned out? How did you feel about having to abandon it before an ‘official’ release?

A: I get bored of things very easily. Too easily, in fact. But I’ve come to realise it’s a good thing, and the only way of knowing if something’s truly worthwhile. So if you’re looking at something day in, day out for two years and you’re still happy with it, it’s worth seeing through. Aeon was always a prototype exercise and there came a point where I was just fed up of it. Bits of it didn’t look right with certain backdrops, the art style wasn’t focused, and it just plain didn’t work much of the time. It’s amazing anyone used it at all. So when I faced up to the need to finish it, it was clear it had to be scrapped and started afresh.

Q: Let’s move on to your upcoming project, Stark. First of all, what made you decide to come back to the skinning game?

A: I think I’ve answered that above. I did drop out of the whole thing for a few months, though, because the task of basically putting a new design together from top to bottom was just mountainous, and believe it or not I do have a day job. But you regain your energy after a while and one day it comes rushing back out, so that’s when it all started again – the unending horror ;-).

Q: The early teasers you released caused a rather vocal surge of anticipation within the XBMC community. How do the community’s continued requests and expectations affect you?

A: Dare I say it, you have to ignore a lot of it for the good of the work. It’s not that the comments are unwelcome; on the contrary, there’s just so much goodwill on the XBMC forums that you could easily get complacent, release something prematurely, or get wrapped up in replying to everything and everyone. Who can say how much anticipation there really is for Stark (which, incidentally, is just a codename for this new version)? It’s just a skin for a media centre, ultimately, so I keep that in mind and just get on with it. If the wife can find a Peep Show episode without the screen offending my eyes then that’s good enough for me.

Q: Would you consider Stark to be more of an evolution of Aeon, or are you trying to achieve something new in its own right?

A: It has to be both. Like I said, the vision for Aeon has always been the same so there’s bound to be inheritance. But the Stark version is entirely new code-wise (I’m never sure if we should say “code” or “script” when it comes to XBMC), was texturally designed from scratch and does /a lot/ of new stuff. So it’d be fair to call it a reinvention, I think. Again, the good thing about getting bored easily is that you do something really cool one day, then the next day you look and think, “It needs something else.” So you do this “virtual homepage” thing for the customisation and pat yourself on the back for that, but suddenly it’s not enough. So you have this four-way “compass” menu for changing views that totally fixes everything about that transition, but it’s not enough. So you stick in media flags for things like movie studios and ratings, but an hour later it’s not enough. So you have item lists that transform into and out of… I’ve said enough ;-).

Q: We all know you from your excellent work on XBMC, but are you involved in other projects at the moment?

A: No. Being married and paying the bills while getting this finished, along with its website and user manual, is quite enough for one human being. I’m not an octopus.

Q: What are your tools and platform of choice when it comes to design?

A: Notepad++ and Photoshop. That’s pretty much it. I’m running Windows 7 on the desktop so that’s where I test things on XBMC, and the proper “quality assurance” gets done on the HTPC plugged into my TV. I’ve actually spent so long testing Aeon on the TV that the bulb’s started to go, I have lines running across the screen, and there’s an ghostly image of the Aeon panel view burnt into it. But does my wife see the need for a new one? Of course not.

Q: Beyond XBMC your skins are also widely used on Plex, the excellent XBMC mac spinoff. Does Plex factor in any way in your work on Stark?

A: Not at all, though I welcome the existence of Plex. Supporting two different branches of XBMC would be suicide, though, given the complexities involved. 

Q: You have always maintained a very open stance towards third-party efforts to modify your work. Has that changed in any way since the Meedios incident?

A: Heh, the “Meedios incident”. That was a really unfortunate thing ‘cause I ended up sounding like a right fucking plum but was actually quite upset. I really admire that guy’s work and I appreciate his loyalty to Meedios which is, as I understand it, a bit past its prime. I just wish he’d asked about cloning Stark so long before its release and maybe acknowledged the source at some point, at least before I got an email saying (and I’m paraphrasing), “Oi, your stuff’s a rip-off.” Still, he was decent enough to sort it out and that’s that. Otherwise, my stance has never changed: if you want to mod or port Aeon, be my guest. I’m hoping the documentation and openness of Stark will make that a whole lot easier for people.

Q: What would you say to anyone thinking about getting into the skinning game?

A: Go for it. What harm can it do? Just be aware that it’s a monstrous job if you go it alone and will happily consume hundreds of hours. Alright, that’s the harm it can do.

Q: Once Stark is out, do you have any other projects planned for the future?

A: I’ll actually be glad to just sit back and tinker with it, keeping the website up to date, polishing any rough edges and inventing new stuff. It’s only when you have that stable foundation that the really exciting stuff can happen. Who knows? I might even watch some movies.

Q: Finally, is there anything you wish to tell your fans?

A: I have fans? Sorry to all those who’ve PM’d and emailed me over the last few months to no avail. I’m too wrapped up in things to answer everyone. There you go.

[ If you’d like to see more of djh’s upcoming project, due for release in March, head on over to the Aeon Project page. ]