Kodi Community Forum

Just throwing this request out there to see what other skinners think of the idea and if devs think it's possible.

Basically it would work just like the Music and Video overlays, but obviously not dependant on whether media is playing, and be visible all the time unless specified by a window ie <allowdefaultoverlay>no</allowdefaultoverlay>.

The idea being it could be used for global elements (Time, Date, Heading, etc) instead of having to use includes in every window. As it's always loaded so to speak anything like an RSS feed wouldn't get restarted when browsing XBMC. It could also be used for a global menu similar to XeeBo's that currently loads a custom window when accessed which should make it smoother.

Thoughts?

Very good idea.

Using that for menu might not be possible currently. Overlays are modeless dialogs - that means they don't intercept any events (so You can't raelly focus any control inside it). I do like overall idea tho, will investigate what can be done.

pieh Wrote:Overlays are modeless dialogs - that means they don't intercept any events (so You can't raelly focus any control inside it).

Didn't realise this sorry but thanks for looking into it.

I originally wanted something like this when I started coding Alaska because it had a global RSS feed but it didn't stay in synch across different windows.

Thanks.

After some thought - I think we can consider deprecating Music/VideoOverlay and introducing one unified overlay. There it would be skinner choice what controls and what visible conditions he will use.

As for problem (small delay due to loading xml + other initial processing) with xeebo menu custom window - I have series of patches that cause not destroying controls when we close window (so when we activate window second time it still have all the stuff in memory and don't need loading xml again so it's really quick). This unfortuntely still need some work and may cause some bugs in some cases.