2013-07-24, 01:21
I noticed that when a video is paused and I'm on the Home screen, with the pause overlay in the top centre and the media overlay in the bottom right, that the Progress/Activity bar is not able to show, so if I scan/update the library I've got no way to see how it's doing. If I unpause the video so that the pause OSD goes away, the Activity bar appears again but I was wanting to wait until the Activity had finished before watching the video to avoid any stuttering from overloading the Pi.
I shouldn't try and multi-task so much I know but if there is a simple way to fix this it would be great as it can be a pain to have to stop a streaming video rather than pause it, as it then can take a while to navigate back to it and re-start it.
I hope the following comes across as constructive feedback rather than whinging, as mainly I'm blown away with how nice and clear your skin is
Whilst your weather screen is great and nice and clear, I'm kinda missing the Weather page from Confluence, with the various options of 10 day forecast, etc in the side pop-out menu. Another tweak I saw (in Amber I think) is to replace the word Location in the side pop-out menu with the actual location (i.e. London) which looks nicer I think and helps to make it clear what location is currently selected. Obviously on your screen it's not such an issue as it clearly shows the current location up the top, so it's more if you were going to use a pop-out menu, as on other skins I've found that tends to obscure the Location on the main screen, making it all the more useful to be able to see what location is currently selected rather than just the word Location.
I'm also rather missing the video info icons (Xvid, mkv, AC3, DTS, etc) that Confluence shows in some of it's views (Coverflow, Poster Wrap, Fanart, Media Info). I realise that we have to use the "extract information from files" option to even get these and that a lot of people recommend disabling this option on the RPi but as I'll be using a shared MySQL database on the PC and running XBMC on there to populate the libary initially, the RPi is only going to have to update the library with a few files occasionally, so I think it will be OK to use this option.
I tend to switch between the views as sometimes I like the big pictures of each film in Coverflow as it looks cool, whilst other times it's more useful when choosing a film to be able to see some details, as with the Fanart view. It's also nice to be able to see the numerical rathing next to each film, as in Media Info 1 and 2 and I find it important to be able to see the Run Time as with Poster Wrap, Coverflow and Fanart.
I think out of the Confluence views, the one I'd use most is Fanart, as it shows the covers, the media info icons, the runtime, the rating and some details of the plot, etc. It would be nicer if the covers were bigger though and if the text box was stretched to the full width of the screen and not such a large gap left between the title and the next lines down, it wouldn't need to be so tall and would leave room to make the covers bigger, although as your skin's all about clarity, if you did want to make a view based on this you might want to leave the covers the size they are and use the extra space to make the text (particularly the plot) bigger, as that can be quite hard to read.
My second favourite view is probably Media Info 1 as sometimes it's just quicker and easier to navigate a text list and it has almost as much details as Fanart but the plot text is quite hard to read and there's no room to make it bigger (without needing a lot of scrolling).
Out of your current views, perhaps Wrap is the most amenable to being adapted as most of the top half of the screen is empty and could be used for a box containing the same details as Confluence's Fanart view. I do find the current movie focus being on the left rather disorientating though, so perhaps you could consider moving it to the centre, as with the Coverflow view.
Anyway, as I said, I hope you find this constructive
I shouldn't try and multi-task so much I know but if there is a simple way to fix this it would be great as it can be a pain to have to stop a streaming video rather than pause it, as it then can take a while to navigate back to it and re-start it.
I hope the following comes across as constructive feedback rather than whinging, as mainly I'm blown away with how nice and clear your skin is
Whilst your weather screen is great and nice and clear, I'm kinda missing the Weather page from Confluence, with the various options of 10 day forecast, etc in the side pop-out menu. Another tweak I saw (in Amber I think) is to replace the word Location in the side pop-out menu with the actual location (i.e. London) which looks nicer I think and helps to make it clear what location is currently selected. Obviously on your screen it's not such an issue as it clearly shows the current location up the top, so it's more if you were going to use a pop-out menu, as on other skins I've found that tends to obscure the Location on the main screen, making it all the more useful to be able to see what location is currently selected rather than just the word Location.
I'm also rather missing the video info icons (Xvid, mkv, AC3, DTS, etc) that Confluence shows in some of it's views (Coverflow, Poster Wrap, Fanart, Media Info). I realise that we have to use the "extract information from files" option to even get these and that a lot of people recommend disabling this option on the RPi but as I'll be using a shared MySQL database on the PC and running XBMC on there to populate the libary initially, the RPi is only going to have to update the library with a few files occasionally, so I think it will be OK to use this option.
I tend to switch between the views as sometimes I like the big pictures of each film in Coverflow as it looks cool, whilst other times it's more useful when choosing a film to be able to see some details, as with the Fanart view. It's also nice to be able to see the numerical rathing next to each film, as in Media Info 1 and 2 and I find it important to be able to see the Run Time as with Poster Wrap, Coverflow and Fanart.
I think out of the Confluence views, the one I'd use most is Fanart, as it shows the covers, the media info icons, the runtime, the rating and some details of the plot, etc. It would be nicer if the covers were bigger though and if the text box was stretched to the full width of the screen and not such a large gap left between the title and the next lines down, it wouldn't need to be so tall and would leave room to make the covers bigger, although as your skin's all about clarity, if you did want to make a view based on this you might want to leave the covers the size they are and use the extra space to make the text (particularly the plot) bigger, as that can be quite hard to read.
My second favourite view is probably Media Info 1 as sometimes it's just quicker and easier to navigate a text list and it has almost as much details as Fanart but the plot text is quite hard to read and there's no room to make it bigger (without needing a lot of scrolling).
Out of your current views, perhaps Wrap is the most amenable to being adapted as most of the top half of the screen is empty and could be used for a box containing the same details as Confluence's Fanart view. I do find the current movie focus being on the left rather disorientating though, so perhaps you could consider moving it to the centre, as with the Coverflow view.
Anyway, as I said, I hope you find this constructive