dorado-hd/docs/zune-hd-ui-canon.md

Zune HD UI Canon

The authoritative description of the Microsoft Zune HD on-device interface that Dorado-HD replicates. Compiled from contemporaneous reviews (CNET, Gizmodo, SlashGear, TechCrunch, Windows Central, ZDNet, PCMag, ITPro Today, Sept 2009), the ZuneDev/Dorado decompilation corpus, and ZuneRedux community resources. Every screen in Dorado-HD must be checkable against this document.

1. Hardware & canvas

• Display: 3.3" capacitive multi-touch OLED, 480x272 (wide), Tegra APX.
• Buttons: power/hold (top), home (below screen), media/quickplay (left edge).
• On Android we re-render this canvas at 480x272 design units (see DeviceCanvas) for device mode, and reflow the same components for adaptive mode on tall phones.

2. Core design language (Metro / Zegoe)

• White text on matte black. Typography is the UI; chrome is banned.
• Font: Zegoe UI (Microsoft-modified Segoe). We ship Selawik (OFL, Segoe-metric) by default; authentic Zegoe import is not implemented in v1 (planned/post-device).
• Menu labels are lowercase, oversized, and deliberately cropped at the right screen edge (Gizmodo: "the word marketplace is cut off at the penultimate letter").
• Opacity communicates state: active 100%, neighbors ~40%, metadata ~60%.
• Zero corner radius, zero drop shadows, no skeuomorphism. Ever.
• Accent color themes: Zune pink #FA2A55 (default), orange #F09609, cyan #1BA1E2, lime #339933, purple #A200FF.
• Kinetic scrolling with strong deceleration (cubic/exponential ease-out).
• Lists stagger their entrance (~15-25 ms per item cascading slide).

3. Navigation model

3.1 Home menu (default view)

A vertical text list: music · videos · pictures · radio · marketplace · social · podcasts · internet · settings (Zune HD firmware 4.x). All nine entries are functional in Dorado-HD — matching the launch reviews (Sept 2009: Engadget, CNET, Gizmodo), which document every entry as a first-class surface rather than a placeholder.

• Flick vertically to scroll (kinetic).
• Tap an entry to enter. The whole entry is the button — text only.
• Items are cropped at the right edge as a signature.

3.2 Quickplay (the "left screen")

• Slide the home menu right to reveal Quickplay parked "left and rear" with a parallax 3D slide (Windows Central: "left and to the rear, in a bit of visual 3D trickery").
• Quickplay contains: Now Playing (current track card: art, title, artist), Pins (user-pinned items — long-press anything to pin), History (recently played), New (recently added).
• Purpose: bypass collection drilling; reach relevant content instantly.
• On device the left-edge hardware button summons it; in Dorado-HD it is the home screen's left page.

3.3 Crossbar ("sub-menus arrayed left to right across the top")

• Inside music: top crossbar row is albums · artists · playlists · songs · genres (real Zune order).
• Extension (D4): Dorado-HD appends a sixth audiobooks pivot. The device shipped an audiobook library (GemLibraryAudiobookPartScene, parity audit §2), but its crossbar position is not recoverable from the sources; keeping books inside the music pivot leaves the nine-entry home menu untouched (§3.1). Labelled a post-device extension per §10.
• Flick horizontally on the crossbar (or content) to switch pivots; content slides horizontally beneath the fixed crossbar.
• Lists scroll vertically: textual (artists, genres) or grid (albums).

3.4 Back gesture = tap the screen header (and the screen-edge back arrow)

• There is no hardware back button. The top-of-screen heading (e.g. "music" on the Music screen or "settings" on Settings) functions as the back button (ZDNet Quick Start Guide; Gizmodo). Tapping the header returns up one level.
• The header is rendered with the signature oversized typography (40sp, Selawik/Zegoe Light) without vertical clipping; long titles crop horizontally at the right edge as a signature.
• Now Playing is the device's documented exception: it shows an explicit left-arrow back button (Gizmodo). Dorado-HD preserves this.
• Dorado-HD additionally places a faint back arrow at the right edge of the header on every detail screen, so the affordance is also visible to users who never realize the header text is tappable. The arrow and the header text are equivalent back actions; the header remains the canon-correct wayfinding signature.

3.5 Alphabet jump

• A separated rail of faint letters runs along the right edge of long lists. Tap any letter → a full A–Z index pops up → pick a letter to jump to the first row whose label begins with that letter.
• This is the same right-edge rail the device shipped; earlier descriptions described an "inline" placement (letters among the rows). Inline placement was widely reported as a mis-tap hazard (Gizmodo: "I've accidentally hit a letter when I meant to hit an artist"); the separated rail is the canon-correct affordance.

3.6 Apps (marketplace)

• Official apps and games were delivered exclusively through the Apps section of Zune Marketplace (Wikipedia, List of Zune applications). There was no home-menu apps entry.
• In Dorado-HD the marketplace pivot's apps section lists installed mini-apps plus the frozen official catalog (unavailable entries dim).
• Mini-apps open fullscreen and return via the cropped header / system back (the device used its physical home button). See §8.

4. Now Playing (the signature screen)

Source variants (device scenes GemNowPlayingRadioScene, GemNowPlayingPicturesScene): a radio stream shows the station name and dial frequency with a live (non-seekable) transport and no queue/hearts; a picture presents full-bleed with a title/date caption, wrap-around prev/next and auto-hiding chrome. The music presentation below is unchanged.

Layout (from ITPro Today's walkthrough):

• Explicit back arrow top-left.
• Artist name and album name (tappable: artist → their crossbar page with albums/songs/bio/photos/related; song title → the album's track list).
• Album art prominent.
• Bottom row: shuffle, repeat, rating (heart / broken heart).
• The card floats over artist photography fetched from zune.net keyed by MusicBrainz ID (see net/ in Dorado-HD; recreated by ZuneArtistImages).

Interactions:

• Idle for a few seconds → screensaver: metadata (artist, track, album, length, art) slowly scrolls over the artist photo, "super-smooth".
• Swipe left/right → skip to next/previous track.
• Tap empty space → transport overlay: play/pause center, volume up / volume down at top/bottom, previous/next at left/right (ITPro Today). Also summoned by the device's media button.
• Swipe up/down (overlay visible) → volume up/down.

Ratings (tri-state heart, from the Zune desktop/HD family):

• Heart = favorite (prioritized by Smart DJ/Quickplay).
• Broken heart = dislike (skipped in shuffle).
• Unrated = neutral.
• Smart DJ honored ratings: hearts were prioritized and broken hearts skipped when shuffling (Microsoft press release, Sept 15 2009). Dorado-HD's shuffle mirrors this on-device behavior.

5. Lock/wake behavior

• Wake shows the user wallpaper behind a "software shade"; slide the shade up to reveal the home screen (ITPro Today). Dorado-HD implements this as an in-app WallpaperManager-backed shade (ui/DoradoRoot.kt, design/components/LockShade.kt); the Android lock screen remains the OS wake surface beneath it.
• PIN lock (device GemSettingPinLockScene / HudPinLockScene): settings ▸ screen lock sets a 4–6 digit PIN (PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256, salted; never stored in plaintext), an optional auto-lock on backgrounding, and a lock now action. With a PIN set the shade presents a numeric keypad (tokenized, zero radius, no Material chrome) with a failure limiter (5 tries → 30 s); system back cannot bypass it. With no PIN the drag-to-unlock path is unchanged.

6. Motion rules

• Navigation: content slides horizontally with deceleration; deeper screens slide in from the right while the parent dims slightly leftward.
• Crossbar pivot switch: horizontal slide, no bounce.
• Kinetic lists: fling, then long deceleration to rest.
• Everything fast: Metro is "designed to feel fast and responsive".
• The device's touch/kinetic parameters are the XuiTouchSettings values the shell applied (gemstone.exe VA 0x1C900–0x1CB64, handed to XuiSetTouchSettings). Dorado-HD consumes the corroborated drag/skip deadband 25.0 (0x10 → DoradoTokens.SKIP_DRAG_PX).
• Kinetic integrator (device, cited). xuidll.dll@0x41841D58 integrates pos += (dt_ms/1000)·v with dt floored at 33.333 ms (30 fps), updates v' = v·(1 + c[+0xB0]) clamped to ±(step·c[+0xB4]), and ticks at 16 ms (62.5 Hz, FUN_41848B98); drag velocity is capped at 32.0 (FUN_4184C310). Correction: the earlier attribution of HD's retention 0.95 to XuiTouchSettings[0x1C] is wrong — the integrator reads [0x08]/[0x0C], never [0x1C]. DoradoMotion.KINETIC_FRAME_RETENTION (0.95) / …LANE_FRAME_RETENTION (0.94) are empirical approximations of this glide. Full extraction: docs/zune-hd-touch-settings.md §6; audit: docs/zune-hd-parity-audit.md §3.

7. Banned in Dorado-HD (invariant list, mirrors Dorado)

• RoundedCornerShape / any nonzero corner radius on UI chrome.
• Drop shadows on text/buttons; gradient chrome; skeuomorphic textures.
• Icon-only navigation in the main hierarchy (text is navigation).
• Material default colors/typography leaking into screens.
• Star ratings (Zune is heart-based, tri-state).

8. Mini-app platform (Dorado-HD)

• Apps open fullscreen: no MiniPlayer; no crossbar unless the app defines one.
• The cropped header is the back affordance; system back also returns to marketplace/apps (canon §3.6).
• Apps must render correctly in device mode (480x272) and adaptive mode.
• Dorado-HD ships behavioral re-implementations only — no Microsoft code, binaries or assets.
• All 62 official packages are implemented (program record: official-apps-audit.md, per-app behavior: apps/). The OfficialCatalog → DoradoApps mapping is total: every catalog row resolves to a launchable app.
  • Utilities & music (12): calculator, notes, stopwatch, alarm clock, calendar, level, metronome, piano, drum machine, chord finder, music quiz, shuffle by album.
  • Card, board & AI (9): solitaire, sudoku, hexic, reversi, hearts, spades, checkers, chess, texas hold 'em.
  • Casual & puzzle (23): color spill, supernova, tiles, slider puzzle, shell game, trash throw, tug-o-war, snowball, run and jump, hairball, splatter bug, goo splat, a beanstalk tale, animalgrams, bbq battle, bees, castles and cannons, decoder ring, fan prediction, penalty flick soccer, space battle 2, vine climb, wordmonger.
  • Touch, toy & physics (5): dr optics, fingerpaint, 3D picture puzzle, finger physics, tiki totems.
  • Big engines (6): audiosurf tilt, echoes, labyrinth, lucky lanes bowling, PGR Ferrari, vans sk8.
  • Dead-service local UIs (7 packages + the social shell): weather, twitter, facebook, email, messenger, msn money, zune reader, zunesocial — pixel-faithful layouts with simulated local content, clearly offline.
• Provenance: every behavior is re-derived from the decrypted package tree (docs/zcp-inventory.md, docs/apps/), never copied; all artwork, levels, word lists and audio are re-authored in code (NOTICE.md).

9. Reference library

• dorado (desktop) design-system skill + extracted Zune assets (MIT).
• ZuneRedux/zune-hd-apps — original HD app archive (design reference only). The corpus's NX container, Authenticode signature, manifest records and AES-ECB-encrypted payload are documented in docs/zcp-inventory.md (regenerable via tools/zcp_inventory.py). Metadata only; binaries are never bundled or shipped.
• spidersandmoths/ZuneArtistImages — recreated catalog.zune.net semantics.
• zuneupdate.com — community resource server (resources.zune.net).
• BillyOutlast/MusicIn2001 — behavioral spec only (Research-Only license).
• Microsoft UI Patents — authoritative interaction mathematics and state machines: US 8,560,975 B2 (Cropped typography and kinetic scroll), US 8,826,177 B2 (Application Pivot Navigation), US 8,429,565 B2 (Lock screen shade gesture), US D628,583 S (Quickplay parallax shelf).
• Zune HD Disassembly Corpus (docs/zune-hd-disassembly.md) — generated by scripts/disassemble_zune_hd.py from PavoBaseline.Cab. Reconstructs the native gemstone.exe shell, xuidll.dll XUI runtime, and authentic scene hierarchy (GemStartScene, GemTiltScene, GemPivotScene, GemNowPlayingScene).
• Touch & kinetic ground truth (docs/zune-hd-touch-settings.md) — the 80-byte XuiTouchSettings struct (xuidll.dll VA 0x41874314), its XUI defaults, and the shell's effective gemstone.exe values.
• Period reviews, Sept 2009 (listed above) for interaction ground truth.

10. Post-device extensions

Behaviors Dorado-HD adds that the Zune HD did not ship. These are never canon; they must be labelled as extensions wherever they surface.

Shipped: Dynamic Mix (similar-to-track/album/favorites + Top Played from persisted play counts), on-device DSP audio features, Last.fm scrobbling with an offline queue, LRCLIB lyrics, the Glance Now Playing widget, cloud update-check, Device Link (mDNS discovery + paired LAN sync), EQ presets, fade-through crossfade (crossfade setting: linear volume ramp over the track tail plus a fade-in on the next item — Media3 has no overlapping crossfade; labelled "fade-through" wherever it surfaces), and the sleep timer (settings ▸ playback; countdown shown in the Now Playing status OSD), and the live FFT visualizer (permission-free PCM tap into FeatureMath's FFT; procedural animation remains the fallback), and the richer lock-screen surface (DoradoMediaNotificationProvider: dedicated public low-importance channel, compact transport actions from the session layout, album art via the session bitmap loader), and the audiobook library (grouped parts, resume and bookmark positions, and a 0.75–2.0× reading-speed selector; anchored to the device's GemLibraryAudiobookPartScene).

Zune-Card artwork export (social/CardRenderer.kt + CardExporter.kt: ACTION_SEND PNG via FileProvider, save-to-Pictures on API 29+) is an extension; built-in playlists (BuiltIn-*) and the deep queue engine are device-era behaviours, not extensions.

Pending: live-radio pause-and-cache — tracked in docs/parity-roadmap.md (M5/M6/M10). N/A (canon §11): ±5-minute rewind requires a time-shifting server; the shipped radio is a plain progressive Icecast stream, so "pause" simply reconnects at the live edge.

• Lane fling tuning. The device's kinetic glide is pos += (dt/1000)·v at 62.5 Hz (xuidll.dll@0x41841D58; see §6). Dorado-HD approximates it with a KINETIC_FRAME_RETENTION of 0.95 for vertical lists and 0.94 for horizontal lanes (the longer retention over-glides a carousel on a modern phone). These are empirical approximations, not device constants (zune-hd-parity-audit.md §3).

11. Device label vocabulary (cited)

Original wording recovered from the shell resource keys, recorded so display copy can be aligned canon-first (do not change copy without updating this section):

• "Various Artist" (gemstone.exe@0x119A4) — HD currently uses "unknown artist".
• " by " title/artist separator (gemstone.exe@0x15A60) — HD uses an em dash.
• Empty-state keys noItems / noItems_local / noItems_online / Empty (gemstone.exe@0x14160/0x148BC/0x14840/0x12B7C) — HD uses bespoke per-screen copy.
• Transport/status words Ffwd, Mute, Disconnected, Refresh, Wishlist (gemstone.exe@0x19D18/0x19D2C/0x19D50/0x12054/0x19790).
• Transport labels and the volume formatter also live in zhud_serv.dll (Play/Pause/Ffwd/Mute@0x419B4C58-84, FormatVolumeEx@0x419D7E88).

Tracked in zune-hd-parity-audit.md §10.

Decision (M12). The strings above are recovered from the shell's resource keys, not confirmed display copy; the copy is therefore left unchanged in v1 rather than guessed. Revisit only with a confirmed display-string source.