Roku Developer Program

[TheEndless]

I'm just curious. I noticed that in each of your channels, the poster screens always start on the fourth item in the content list. I've also noticed that some of the new channels do the same (ex. Mog). I assume yours are all the same, because they all use the same core codebase, but I'd like to know if there's some technical or functional reason for this, or is it just your little "signature" if you will? Admittedly, I've never set up a poster screen without automatically selecting the first item in the list, so it may be the default behavior, in which case, you can ignore me... 😉

[RokuChris]

It's mostly an aesthetic thing. It always bothered me how lopsided a freshly displayed poster screen looked if the leftmost item was selected by default. Selecting the 4th item not only balances things visually, but it also allows more posters to be visible, giving the user a more complete overview of what is available from the screen.

In cases where selecting the leftmost item is appropriate, several of my channels do so. A list of episodes ordered by date in the archive.org channel for instance. But in cases where order is not overly important, like the home screen of the Twitter channel or of Newscaster, I like to make things look a little more balanced and present as much information as possible to the user at first glance.

[TheEndless]

Thanks for the response! I thought that might be the case, but why not go with index 6 instead, so you have the same number of icons on either side? Ironically, it was actually the lopsidedness of having 3 icons on one side and 5 on the other that made me ask in the first place. Is that an overscan/SD thing?

On a related note, is it coincidence that the MOG channel does the same, or did you work on that one, too?

[RokuChris]

"TheEndless" wrote:
Thanks for the response! I thought that might be the case, but why not go with index 6 instead, so you have the same number of icons on either side? Ironically, it was actually the lopsidedness of having 3 icons on one side and 5 on the other that made me ask in the first place. Is that an overscan/SD thing?

On a related note, is it coincidence that the MOG channel does the same, or did you work on that one, too?

It is an SD thing. Fewer posters appear on screen in SD mode. And no, I didn't work on MOG.