Allow home screen to be populated from favourites subfolder

[convertapple]

The current skins seem too inflexible and pretty dated with their rigid menu structure that just doesn't apply to todays media with so many more options. On sub screens, you can select from views:- List, BigList, BigWall, Panel etc so why not on the home screen in the same way?

If favourites allowed subfolders of favourites. The home screen could be populated by reading from a preset "favourites/home" subfolder that was pre-populated with Favourites pointing to Movies, TV, LiveTV etc + view=HorizontalList to re-create current menu.

But someone could select view=BigWall and modify the favourites/home folder to contain SmartPlaylist.RecentMovies, SmartPlaylist.RecentMovies, Movies, Absolute90s, Plex.HomeVideos to give a very easily customised homescreen.

Favourites currently allows you to choose a thumbnail. If it alternatively allowed you to select a thumbnail view based on the content (single thumb, horizontal scrolling row(max 1st 15 items), vertical column etc) then you could add in recently-added or in-progress lines to the homescreen. Indeed by editing the "favourites/home" subfolder favourite you could select the actual view the home-page would use.

As it leverages stuff that is mostly pre-existing (smart playlists, favourites, views) it appears to be lot of gain for not too much pain and unifies and imho simplifies the way MrMc deals with multiple skins by having a single much more versatile skin.

I have already used a much more in depth version of my concept (objects describe themselves = oo for UI) to write a bespoke CMS for a large financial company a few years ago (.net contractor), that is very versatile while being very simple for users to conceptualise and manage. I will PM you a link if you like.


(PS: I deleted my previous attempt at explaining this as it didn't get it across properly imho)