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installing touch skins on on non touch devices - Printable Version

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installing touch skins on on non touch devices - Martijn - 2013-01-31

Problem:
At the moment users are able to install skins that only offer touch screen support. If they install such a skin there is no way from XBMC standpoint to switch back besides SSH into the box and kill the skin folder. We also discusses this problem at devcon to some extend.

Solution
add a <supports></supports> (or something like that) to the addon.xml which defines what input methods the skin supports. examples
<supports>keyboard mouse touch</supports>
If they try to install perhaps prevend this from happening and show a kai toast.
Other possibility is to ask if they want to switch and have a yes/no dialog which will be closed again if no action is taken within xx amount of time.



Side note:
Another discussion was about having a <supports>pvr</supports> tag in addon.xml to give a notification that it doesn't support it.
Adding PVR is a huge job and personally i don't even care about it (atm). Having this as requirement to be allowed in xbmc repo is a limitation imo that would leave out some nice skins because adding it is just to big of job or skinner has no interest in adding PVR.


RE: installing touch skins on on non touch devices - da-anda - 2013-02-01

@<supports>
I'm all for it as discussed at devcon. But I'd not write <supports>a b c</supports> but something like:
Code:
<supports>
  <inputmethod>keyboard</inputmethod>
  <inputmethod>mouse</inputmethod>
  <feature>pvr</feature>
</supports>

As for the notification if the skin doesn't support the input methods of the system, I'm not sure what the best option would be. After thinking back and forth and deleting the novel I already wrote I came to the conclusion that a YES/NO dialog seems to be the best solution. It should pop up after the skin has been switched and only in case the "inputmethod" tag is not defined in the addon.xml or not supported by the skin. Dialog should say something like "This skin doesn't seem to support your input method, would you like to keep it?" and showing a countdown somewhere (either in letter, like "10 sec" or as a progress bar going backwards)

@pvr
We should add such flags, but those should only be used to indicate that feature in the addon info window. It shouldn't prevent installation or such. The only thing to prevent installation are missing dependencies and the input/control methods which we take care of by this dialog.


RE: installing touch skins on on non touch devices - Ned Scott - 2013-02-02

Quote:Other possibility is to ask if they want to switch and have a yes/no dialog which will be closed again if no action is taken within xx amount of time.

That's probably the best solution, though it would be nice to see some kind of feature/flag support when viewing the list of skins.


Re: installing touch skins on on non touch devices - Martijn - 2013-02-02

@supports
Yep something exactly like that. Of course like Ned says show a feature flag on addon info screen that you see what it supports

@ pvr
This should indeed not block installation. It should just be mentioned as a feature flag.



RE: installing touch skins on on non touch devices - ronie - 2013-02-02

@pvr xbmc currently ships with a non-pvr version of Touched,
so i don't think we can justify having this as a requirement for other skins.


Re: RE: installing touch skins on on non touch devices - Martijn - 2013-02-02

(2013-02-02, 14:56)ronie Wrote: @pvr xbmc currently ships with a non-pvr version of Touched,
so i don't think we can justify having this as a requirement for other skins.

I don't think we should have it as a requirement at all.