First gen Xbox 360 "blades" UI was alright too

Does Kodi still have a skin that looks like that?

Not as far as I'm aware, and it wouldn't be able to do it justice, because the original Xbox dash was fully rendered live in 3D. It's more akin to playing a game than navigating a 2D themed app UI.

Demo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1oCtN498Sus

There is an actively developed theme that emulates the look of the Xbox 360 'blades' menu though, called TetradUI.

Microsoft is a pioneer in "losing the sauce".
Look no further than the Original Blades dash and NXE compared to the last one.
Don't even get me started on the flaming hot dumpster fire that is the Series X dash.

I don't even need something as cool as this, but can we please start prioritizing non laggy UIs again!?

Yes that'd be cool. As a Series S user i hate the laggy menus.

Series s/x works but that's all I can praise it for.

I think part of the reason consoles lost the sauce is that all the fancy stuff could be exploited for homebrew and jailbreaking. Like the mail system in the wii.

The flubber that plays on boot is also a live render, it has a noise function that makes every startup unique. You can edit the program that runs to change some of the rendering functions on a modded box as well, it is a very unique console startup.

Yeah, it was awesome

Recently had to work with someone who's on Windows 11 and every time they opened the file manager, it took two seconds to render the toolbar. Like, what the fuck, that's just some buttons with icons. It should take a singular frame to render that, not two seconds. How do you even begin to fuck up the implementation so bad that it could possibly take this long?

I just needed to rant, but I guess, if you want to take something away from this, then: Don't put your hope on Microsoft.

It's not referring to features, it's referring to the tendency for menu screens to become convoluted messes instead of simple and easy to read.

Look at COD for a perfect example.

it’s referring to the tendency for menu screens to become convoluted messes instead of simple and easy to read.

I think it's more that they became more streamlined and context based instead of trying to look like it's from the future.

Like, 2d navigation instead of just lists, and then the currently selected image determines the background for the UI, instead of "here's a list and a 3d looking ball in some field"

That always reminded me of Metroid prime.

That's really cool, I didn't know that.

I also love the Flubber reference.

They probably reimplemented Explorer as an electron app

I have the horrible feeling that they even specifically start an HTML renderer for that toolbar itself, because the rest of the application appears fairly quickly.
Well, and because you would typically share the code for rendering the file manager contents with the code for displaying the desktop icons.

So, in hopes that they did not rewrite the desktop icons in React, nor now ship two implementations for rendering those icons, I choose to believe that they built a horrible Frankenstein file manager instead. 🫠