PatrickBateman Wrote:Thanks for all the support and I really appreciate the bug fixes and this wonderfully fast skin.
You mentioned an update was posted to the git but nothing is showing at my end, will this be available soon with the music Addons bug fix and slide views enabled.
It's available, but you would have to download the skin from git to get it. Of course you can wait for a new official release, which shouldn't be too long after the holidays.
Quote:Thanks again for everything and hope you've at least had a few hours off to enjoy the holidays 
Cheers,
Pat~
No worries, I had the whole week off
Kolabor Wrote:Small typo in latest English strings.xml Jeroen:
Code:
<string id="31111">PLaylist Options</string>
Thanks, fixed on git.
travisbell Wrote:Hey Jeroen,
Beautiful skin mate. So far after 2 days of full time use I’ve only really noticed one issue. If it’s been mentioned, please excuse me. There’s 207 pages here… 
When using the “slide” view and paging through (page up/page down) an item is always skipped so through 14 “pages" @ 6 titles per page (~80 total shows) 14 shows never find their way on screen.
Is this a known issue? I’m musing a fairly standard setup I think. 1080p output.
Thanks!
I think I know what you mean. When you are in slide view you see a part of the last poster on screen. When you go to the next page that one will be off screen to the left as the focus is always given to the second of the items that are on screen, essentially visually skipping one item.
I could make it so the last item on screen is always completely on screen, but I like that it will show a part of an item as a visual indication that there are more items coming up. I hope that makes sense.
I like being able to see part of the next poster too. What I think makes the most sense is that poster, the one that is half shown at the end of a page, should be the poster that gets highlighted (selected) on the next full page switch. This gives your eye a good anchor to understand where you are now.
Does that make sense to you too?
travisbell Wrote:I like being able to see part of the next poster too. What I think makes the most sense is that poster, the one that is half shown at the end of a page, should be the poster that gets highlighted (selected) on the next full page switch. This gives your eye a good anchor to understand where you are now.
Does that make sense to you too?
Yeah it does. However it's not something I can fully control. The only way to achieve this would be to always set focus to the first item of the container, currently it always focuses on the second item in order to also show the previous item in the container. However, on scrolling to the right the list would then always vanish into "nothing" on the left. Hard to show with a static image, but it would look like this:
So, there would never be an item to the left, and on scrolling you would see the items dissapear on the left. So I'm afraid it's a bit of a trade-off.
I really like the elegant looks of reFocus, I've got some remarks though:
I don't know if it's just me, but the OSD, volume control and other "pop ups" (grey background) somehow doesn't seem on par with the great looks of the rest. They kinda remind me of typical Linux GUI, whereas the rest is highly polished.
In case of the OpenSubtitles script this even becomes a problem, as the list of subtitles is very hard to read...
Don't get me wrong, I love this skin! I'm just wondering about these things. If I am allowed: Cirrus is really great in exactly those points, maybe it could be a source of inspiration for the developers.
Jeroen,
I noticed an 'annoyance' the other day when changing my banners to posters for tv shows. When selecting 'info' - 'edit' -'choose thumbnail' and the thumbnail dialog pops up, I've noticed (depending on the server) it can take some time to load and preview the thumbnails.
With confluence, to the left of the thumbnail text is a small preview image, the image becomes visible once it's been downloaded from the scrapper site. This gives you an indication that it's ready to view and can also make the selection process much quicker. In refocus, you have a grey default thumbnail to the left of the text, and the 'big' thumbnail in the preview box to the right. Would it be possible to change the grey static icon on the left to a thumbnail preview?
The way you have it now, one cannot tell if the image has been cached or not, meaning I have to literally scroll through every single thumbnail in the list to preview it, 70% of the time you end up doing this preemptively and end up with no thumbnail and have to wait for it to load.
I can supply images if you struggle to understand.
Cheers.
Loggio.
Hi Jeroen,
Not sure if it's intentional but when using 'deck' view the scrolling seems a little amiss, it scrolls smoothly for about 3 items and then seem to jump rather than scrolling smoothly. Can you replicate this too?
Thanks
Jeroen Wrote:So, there would never be an item to the left, and on scrolling you would see the items dissapear on the left. So I'm afraid it's a bit of a trade-off.
That is indeed a trade-off. The main problem here is that for users who page through the lists on the slide view will miss an item on every page. I’ll let you decide how important that is to fix. Thanks for taking time to think this through with me.
Jeroen Wrote:I like how they provide contrast to the underlying UI and focus on the dialog. I don't have any trouble reading the list of subtitles though. I don't really see how making everything translucent and let dialogs "bleed through" would improve readability
Well, maybe it's just me then... At least on my 26" LCD-TV (about four meters away) I am having a very hard time reading dark grey font on light grey background. Text is much easier to read when the contrast is higher, as when using translucent boxes like you named 'em.
Jeroen Wrote:No worries I can't see them changing anytime soon though as I'm quite pleased with the dialog windows. A lot of polishing up went into them actually. I like how they provide contrast to the underlying UI and focus on the dialog. I don't have any trouble reading the list of subtitles though. I don't really see how making everything translucent and let dialogs "bleed through" would improve readability
Just wanted to chime in on this...you know I'm a huge fan of reFocus, but i agree that the dialogs are really hard to read. The problem, Jeroen, isn't so much the translucency...it's the lack of contrast between the silver and the black lettering, plus the thinness of the lettering itself. The combination can be quite difficult to read at times. Making the letters a little thicker (but not too thick, so as to keep the clean lines of everything) might work if possible to do so.
Another little quibble I have is that it seems counterintuitive to have the "darkened" dialog box button be the "active" button. Usually it's the other way around, where a light colour indicates the active button. Obviously it's set up as it is right now because of the silver colour of the background, so I don't know if there's any way to make it clearer which is the active box...maybe make the highlight colour a shade of blue instead of black? I don't know...
As for the slide view issue, I like the idea you've posted there, Jeroen. I could easily live with not seeing bits of things "off screen", as long as page scrolling doesn't "skip" anything (I hadn't even realized that was happening...just tested it last night to confirm it, couldn't believe it!)
I would say dark grey on almost white provides a lot of contrast. I specifically chose a dark and light styling of the dialog windows, which is also applied to other elements like radiobuttons and other controls. So using blue there all of a sudden (and lowering the contrast by doing so btw) wouldn't look good nor consistent. I can't just make the fonts thicker, they are the way they are. And changing to another font is out of the question.
Sorry, the dialogs really are not going to change.
The screenshot of the slide view was not an idea, it was an illustration of what I wouldn't want to happen. The problem isn't so much the partially shown poster, it's the container being cut off on the left and not showing the previous item.
ah. LOL....well, I still love reFocus anyway!
thanks for the clarifications Jeroen.
Jeroen Wrote:I would say dark grey on almost white provides a lot of contrast. I specifically chose a dark and light styling of the dialog windows, which is also applied to other elements like radiobuttons and other controls. So using blue there all of a sudden (and lowering the contrast by doing so btw) wouldn't look good nor consistent. I can't just make the fonts thicker, they are the way they are. And changing to another font is out of the question.
Sorry, the dialogs really are not going to change.
I love your skin Jeroen, but the lack of contrast on the dialogs really makes it hard to read for me to. I don't think it's "darkgrey" but more lightgrey on offwhite. And i do not agree with you that thos dialogs have a hig contrast, they have very low contrast.
This is one of the main reasons why I don't use refoucs as my default skin, at the end of the day i prefer usabillity before design and my whole family must be able to use it.
I understand and respect that you are not gone change this, and offcourse it's your skin and totally your decision. I just dont agree with your conclusion that your dialogs have hig contrast, thats all
Keep up the good work Jeroen
Well, change the value for
Color4 in
skin.focus/colors/Defaults.xml to a darker grey, or black even, and voila more contrast
In any case, the new year is approaching so have a great one everybody!
All the best for the new year in which reFocus will finally reach 1.0. Not that version numbers mean that much though
See you on the flipside
Having recently discovered this skin, it has soon gone straight to the top of my favorites list, everything about it seems smooth and clean.
I have a question about music fanart, however I'm not sure whether it is related directly to this skin or XBMC in general.
Is it possible to when in Music Library mode for the skin to display the local folder.jpg and fanart.jpg images? I have saved multiple images in different artist folders, however these only appear in the Files Mode.
There seems to be an issue with the scrapers pulling images from similarly named, but wrong artists so I was hoping to avoid this by using local images.
Trying to set these manually within XBMC by selecting Artist Information does not fix this issue either, as the menu never appears and XBMC appears to get stuck searching for the artist and keeps bringing up the same text box.
After looking at the Thumbnails view, it appears that fanart is used for the artist thumbnails, rather than the folder.jpg. Is there anyway to change this?
Cheers