The November 1, 2010 Xbox Dashboard update has finally fixed one of my biggest annoyances with the interface: the lack of visible indication for preceding items in lists of tiles. Now, you can see the “tail” of the previous item on the left side of the screen before the selected tile, where previously there was nothing. The picture above shows the last item in the My Xbox menu. In the old design all you would see is the System Settings tile, and that’s it. So you never knew where you were in the list. Was it the the end of the list, or was there only one item? The only way to find out was to scroll back. It was a horrible design, and i’m amazed they let it ride for so long.

The “stacked” perspective effect has also been trashed, and it now sports a squared, flat look that simply scrolls side to side. It’s a much cleaner and concise use of screen space now without all the rounded corners and perspective effects. I think there was a subtle tweak to the menu sound effects as well. The “theme” now ties into the recent redesign on Xbox.com — green curves sweeping through white.

Other notable changes are a new “slideshow” first-boot orientation that introduces the controller buttons and on-screen menus in a more illustrated style, hosted by Vanna White — viewable step-by-step or skip it altogether. No more all-or-nothing corny live-action video to sit through. I saw a few new options under Video and HDMI in the System menu, but didn’t poke around everywhere yet.

I’ll be keeping my eyes peeled for other UI-related tweaks in this update.

I downloaded the newest Alpha 3 of Bon Echo, but haven’t yet installed it. Very curious to see what kind of changes are going on in the next generation of Firefox. The anti-phishing popup shown in the screenshots at Mozilla Links looks a little scary. Not quite sure how that would look in LCD. But other things like the integrated search button in the Search Bar are something i’ve basically already done with the icons on the Location Bar. I also already have the magnifying glass icon from back when you could search the document from the search bar—back before the Find bar at the bottom of the window.

I’ve been thinking about releasing lately. I had been thinking that i could just push out what i have and iron out any kinks with updates. But it’s good that i cracked this open, because i realized that there are still some very rough spots that aren’t quite ready.

The hack originated as a way to get the old Go button to match the other toolbarbuttons in my theme. I then began using it as a way to dynamically increase button sizes when space was available, according to Fitts’ Law of interaction design (bigger targets are easier/faster to hit).

I didn’t realize it at first, but the Update notifiation window is completely unstyled. With the recent push of the 1.5.0.1 update, a little window titlebar popped up out of nowhere, but was empty and couldn’t be resized. I figured it was some stray popup ad, but later realized what it was after seeing the real deal on a machine using the default theme. I already tried to start patching that up by copying over the styles in mozapps/update/updates.css, but it didn’t make any visible changes. I’ll have to scrape the theme updates thread for all the necessary changes.

Also a little annoyed with the unstyled feed button in the Location Bar. It’s taking up a good bit of width, and i end up clicking it accidentally. I’ll have to tie that one up soon.