XBMC has a highly “skinnable” interface meaning that it can look radically different based on which “skin” is used. PM3.HD is used by default, so this is what will greet you upon install. You may wish to change the look to something more flashy, more artwork-based, etc. It’s up to you. See the list below for a list of active working skins. Please note that some of these may require bleeding-edge builds of XBMC. Head to the forum or google for development builds, but remember that these are snapshots and not guaranteed to be bug-free. See this page for help installing these skins.
Aeon is a new interface for XBMC that was built upon a very simple brief: to create an attractive, sophisticated and above all personal environment for organising and enjoying media. Of the many HTPC frontends in development and circulation, too many like to bombard the user with overwrought textures that draw attention away from the most important thing of all: the media itself.
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The MediaStream skin was developed by Team Razorfish over the course of about a year, before being publicly released on the 8th August 2008 (08/08/08). It was then developed for a further 4 months until the v1.00 release was made (stable and pretty much bug-free) at the end of 2008. Since that date the skin has been mothballed but it is due to be updated, tidied up and enhanced with new features in the near future.
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Jezz_X has been kind enough to announce the initial public release of his personal MediaStream mod, though the word "mod" hardly fits. It's more of a fresh and modern take on an already great skin; usability has been greatly improved and many of the new XBMC features have been added in.
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The idea for the skin grew out of the feedback we got for the MediaStream skin. Many users seemed to want to make MediaStream more transparent so that they could see the background images better. Since MediaStream was designed to focus on the media it wasn't really practical to adapt it for that purpose. Instead I decided to create a new skin from scratch where the core concept was to make the skin itself very minimal so that the backgrounds could shine through.
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PM3.HD (Project Mayhem III High Definition) Is currently the default skin for XBMC and was based on the design of the old default skin by Chokemaniac. This skin was created because as XBMC moved off the xbox platform onto PC's people were wanting to display proper 720p and 1080p versions of XBMC the old Project Mayhem III skin was designed for use on the xbox at low definition and looked very blocky when scaled up. So this skin was creeated to fill the gap for High definition users
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The goal is to provide a simple but elegant interface that emphasizes efficiency when browsing your media. Important considerations are put on usability, performance, and providing the user with flexibility when it comes to customization. Rapier supports the latest XBMC features and new ones will be added in the future as long as it fits in with Rapier's design goals.
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What is Transparency!? Short answer: a fanart skin. The main goal of Transparency! is showing your fanart, fullscreen, in all of the views, all of the time. Besides this, it also tries to support every neat new feature xbmc has to offer. To save everyone a lot of time and trouble hacking the xml code themselves, all of these new features are already included in the skin, pre-configured and enabled by default (wherever possible).
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