[pecinko]

Well I love the look of this skin! Looks like an Aeon skin but it is lighter which is good....

But could we have the options for more? Like Extra Fanart, view adjustments, moveable home menu items etc....?

Guess where this lightness of Amber came from? If you want bell and whistles try out Aeons. It's over 9000 of them around including very nice and light enough ACE.

Without intention of going into long discussion - there are more stuff involved in skin speed than dropping out bells and whistles. Last time I checked, Aeon Nox was performing real nice and it has all the extras you can think about. Those who are around long enough will remember speed difference between old Aeon and re-written Aeon Nox.

Reason all those extra stuff will probably never be part of this skin is not because my HTPC gear is not up to the task, I use Mac Mini, but because I have no use for it. I simply find most of extra art ugly, I tend to get lost in countless options and last, but not least, I have no time to code and support it. I just want to have non-intrusive, logical and uncluttered interface when I find time to watch my media.

@relyter That said, git is updated with 7x2 grid :-)

[squeegy]

Nice skin!

A few things I noticed that you may want to consider/fix:

• The positioning of pop-up notifications like changing volume smack in the middle of the screen is a bit distracting. Maybe move to a corner?
  
• It's easier to quickly grasp a volume setting seeing a bar instead of a numerical value. Maybe there could be both. Maybe smaller.
  
• The normal position of the clock is top right. When watching a movie and pressing RETURN or pausing the movie, the info bar shows the current time on the top left and the end time in brackets on the right. It'd be nicer to keep the time fixed in one corner. Maybe the playing time and end time could be overlayed on the progress bar instead.
  
• When buffering is needed, e.g. when jumping 10 min when streaming something, the pop-up sometimes disappears very quickly. Of course it's nice if the buffering is fast, but it's a bit distracting. It'd be nice to have a minimum display time for the pop-up. 1 sec?
  
• If I go back to the home screen (or any screen really) while something's playing in the background, I see a maybe 1 or 2 pixel line of the playing movie at the bottom of the screen (720p output here).
  
• When something's playing in the background and I move to "Player" in the home screen, the title is cut off at the top.
  

Hope I didn't come across demanding or anything, just pointing out what struck me in the first hour of using Amber.
Nice work, anyway.

~squeegy

[Bkam]

I have à request Would it be possibly to use fan art from new movies/tv shows and music as wallpapers in the home meny ?

[pecinko]

Nice skin!

A few things I noticed that you may want to consider/fix:

• The positioning of pop-up notifications like changing volume smack in the middle of the screen is a bit distracting. Maybe move to a corner?
  
• It's easier to quickly grasp a volume setting seeing a bar instead of a numerical value. Maybe there could be both. Maybe smaller.
  
• The normal position of the clock is top right. When watching a movie and pressing RETURN or pausing the movie, the info bar shows the current time on the top left and the end time in brackets on the right. It'd be nicer to keep the time fixed in one corner. Maybe the playing time and end time could be overlayed on the progress bar instead.
  
• When buffering is needed, e.g. when jumping 10 min when streaming something, the pop-up sometimes disappears very quickly. Of course it's nice if the buffering is fast, but it's a bit distracting. It'd be nice to have a minimum display time for the pop-up. 1 sec?
  
• If I go back to the home screen (or any screen really) while something's playing in the background, I see a maybe 1 or 2 pixel line of the playing movie at the bottom of the screen (720p output here).
  
• When something's playing in the background and I move to "Player" in the home screen, the title is cut off at the top.
  

Hope I didn't come across demanding or anything, just pointing out what struck me in the first hour of using Amber.
Nice work, anyway.

~squeegy

Thanks for the suggestions!

---

I have à request Would it be possibly to use fan art from new movies/tv shows and music as wallpapers in the home meny ?

Maybe later.

[relyter]

@relyter That said, git is updated with 7x2 grid :-)

Where's my kneeling emoticon? Here it is

[donkee69]

Nice skin i agree with the post above that mentions the volume icon being to large and in the way... also how about a icon for aspect ratio in the movie info?

[da-anda]

I like it. And a very big THUMBS UP for keeping it clean from any clearart, clearlogo, tvtunes and all the other useless crap that's distracting from the content.

[crimsonfury]

Well I love the look of this skin! Looks like an Aeon skin but it is lighter which is good....

But could we have the options for more? Like Extra Fanart, view adjustments, moveable home menu items etc....?

Guess where this lightness of Amber came from? If you want bell and whistles try out Aeons. It's over 9000 of them around including very nice and light enough ACE.

Without intention of going into long discussion - there are more stuff involved in skin speed than dropping out bells and whistles. Last time I checked, Aeon Nox was performing real nice and it has all the extras you can think about. Those who are around long enough will remember speed difference between old Aeon and re-written Aeon Nox.

Reason all those extra stuff will probably never be part of this skin is not because my HTPC gear is not up to the task, I use Mac Mini, but because I have no use for it. I simply find most of extra art ugly, I tend to get lost in countless options and last, but not least, I have no time to code and support it. I just want to have non-intrusive, logical and uncluttered interface when I find time to watch my media.

@relyter That said, git is updated with 7x2 grid :-)

Well since you posted this in the plexbmc thread, I figured the skin works directly with plexbmc.... I just want a skin like yours/Nox that works directly with plexbmc and has all the extras. If nobody wants the extras why use xbmc? Plex is made simple for the same reasons you list. Hence me looking for the best of both worlds with extras and my watch status....

[pecinko]

Well since you posted this in the plexbmc thread, I figured the skin works directly with plexbmc....

Yup, skin has support for PleXBMC add-on. Does this mean all extras that XBMC can offer should automatically be supported?

I just want a skin like yours/Nox that works directly with plexbmc and has all the extras.

This is not the skin you're looking for.

---

Nice skin i agree with the post above that mentions the volume icon being to large and in the way... also how about a icon for aspect ratio in the movie info?

I like it. And a very big THUMBS UP for keeping it clean from any clearart, clearlogo, tvtunes and all the other useless crap that's distracting from the content.

Thanks for feedback, it's appreciated.

[Martijn]

Well since you posted this in the plexbmc thread, I figured the skin works directly with plexbmc....

Yup, skin has support for PleXBMC add-on. Does this mean all extras that XBMC can offer should automatically be supported?

of course it should. how on earth can you release a skin that does not support everything that is available and possible in XBMC?

[crimsonfury]

Well since you posted this in the plexbmc thread, I figured the skin works directly with plexbmc....

Yup, skin has support for PleXBMC add-on. Does this mean all extras that XBMC can offer should automatically be supported?

of course it should. how on earth can you release a skin that does not support everything that is available and possible in XBMC?

My post was not trying to slam you and your skins... My point is why are the big boy loaded skins(bells/whistles) staying away from plexbmc and all the light skins implement it? I also made the point that the light skins are very much similar already to the Plex skins so its kind of pointless to run xbmc for those of us who use plex... But I love xbmc's features....

I do like this skin though! If I still had my ATV2 I would be rock'n it!

[User 34959]

You can think anything you want of Plex but the truth is that the interface is very clean and simple, and i like the color choice of black, grey and orrange. That's where the inspiration is clearly coming from to Amber. But you still have XBMC's strengths (and weaknesses).

Do you accept pull requests if i see if i can do something about the music video stuff, or do you want to have complete control over the development? But first i would have to find some time, and learn to use Github, two very big ifs

[pecinko]

of course it should. how on earth can you release a skin that does not support everything that is available and possible in XBMC?

Indeed. I guess most of the people just don't realize amount of work needed for that.

[pecinko]

You can think anything you want of Plex but the truth is that the interface is very clean and simple, and i like the color choice of black, grey and orrange. That's where the inspiration is clearly coming from to Amber. But you still have XBMC's strengths (and weaknesses).

I guess you can also say that, if colors would be changed from orange to blue, skin would look like Mediastream Redux.

Story is somewhat different - I wanted to do something different than Quartz and my boys voted on colors that should be used. Older wanted yellow and younger violet :-) Violet was a non-go but I could not use yellow and favour older one, so we ended up with orange. Home layout was chosen from Aeon vs Mediastream, were I got over-voted in favour of the former. Rest of the skin basically build on Mediastream foundation, layout wise - code is Quartz derived, while trying to remedy some not-so-great design choices in Mediastream.

To be quite frank, I don't care at all were inspiration came from as long as skin looks properly. I was probably influenced more or less with all skins that I have used in the past and changed countless layouts while skinning in effort to find best one. The fact that skin looks is probably closest to Mediastream is only a proof that Razorfish guys did it right for the most part (settings window excluding) - so big thanks and kudos to those guys.

Do you accept pull requests if i see if i can do something about the music video stuff, or do you want to have complete control over the development? But first i would have to find some time, and learn to use Github, two very big ifs

We will see if you will find the time and I will probably push page layouts to final stage in meantime. As for Github, I manage to get by with using only basic functions. SourceTree.app is of a BIG help here and I can't thank developers enough for releasing it.

[Martijn]

I recommend SmartGit
It's free to use for opensource development and multi-platform (win/osx/linux)