A post I wrote with some of the members of my old team just went live on the Xbox Engineering Blog.

Excerpt:

In the beginning, there were the blades, and they were good. For years, the beloved blades lit up television screens everywhere. Although we loved them dearly, the blades had limitations that made it difficult to create new types of compelling content, to run promotional or community events, and to highlight whatever new things are going on in Xbox LIVE.

NXE changed all that. Obviously, there was a huge change in layout, moving from the blades to a grid format consisting of several rows of horizontal “channels,” each containing many “slots.” In the blades style dashboard, the layout was almost entirely baked into the console flash. NXE UI, conversely, is downloaded from a system called Dante.