[Galefury]

I think that the darkness is actually a png image. Search in media folder.

[kaiseruk]

thanks, renaming this file sorted it

/skin.refocus-master/media/overlays/vignette.png

I love this skin just that the addon i use (pseudotv) gives nearly non stop notifications for around the first 5 minutes as it background loads channels that i created, so the screen was very dark with the screen i was using and angle it was viewed at.

[mortstar]

Something I've noticed with 'recommended episodes' is that it always defaults to list view. After every update to the data or after a reboot, I have to reset the view to slide. This doesn't happen in 'new episodes' which keeps its view setting. I wasn't sure if this is a skin or system issue.

I've also noticed an inconsistency with window heading colouring:
- New episodes the heading is '<blue>new <white>episodes'
- Recommended episodes the heading is '<white>recommended episodes'

Very minor issue I know, but your work's so good we're down to the nit-picking now.

[Jeroen]

Also, as a request which I'm sure you're tired of at this point, currently pausing a movie or TV show brings up that beautiful blue bar and pressing "i" bings up the fanart and episode/movie information on top of the bar. Would it be possible to 1) have a setting to change the fanart to the logo or the logo over the fanart, and 2) would it be possible to have a setting to have the pause button also bring up the information brought up with "i"? Or in lieu of the info appearing when paused, perhaps having the logo show up over the bar in the middle or one of the lower corners?

I pushed a commit to Github which should take care of this. The image will show the fanart and the logo(when available and enabled in skin settings). When "prefer landscape thumbnails" is enabled, it will show the landscape image when available. When "prefer landscape thumbnails" is enabled, but no landscape image is available it will fall back to the fanart and logo.
If fanart and landscape both aren't available, it will fall back to the poster / thumb.

OpenElec startup

Cool

Something I've noticed with 'recommended episodes' is that it always defaults to list view. After every update to the data or after a reboot, I have to reset the view to slide. This doesn't happen in 'new episodes' which keeps its view setting. I wasn't sure if this is a skin or system issue.

I'm not sure either, but I can't think of anything at skin level that would dictate different behaviour from "normal" nodes. Will try to find out.

I've also noticed an inconsistency with window heading colouring:
- New episodes the heading is '<blue>new <white>episodes'
- Recommended episodes the heading is '<white>recommended episodes'

Yes, it's inconsistent. In recently added episodes I use two separate labels to give some indication of hierarchy. I could do the same with any of the nodes provided by Library Data Provider, but I would need to make a separate variable for each node. Whereas now, it's just one. Just seems a bit excessive, but maybe I will anyway. Another alternative would result in quite long windowtitles. I have to think about how I can simplify things over there.

[Jeroen]

One thing I keep forgetting to ask.

The typography has always been quite an important aspect in reFocus right from the start, to me at least. It's an aspect I am willing to make very little concessions on.

A problem with the fonts however is that they are not open source. This has always prevented the skin from being available in the official xbmc repo for instance. I have spent quite a lot of time in the past trying to find open source fonts that could replace the original fonts. The most difficult to replace are the light font variants used in the window titles and home menu for instance. I am extremely critical in this area, and I never found ones that have the same elegant feel to me. As to me the typography weighs much heavier than availability in the xbmc repo, this has not really been major problem as far as I'm concerned.

Some time ago though I did find an open source font that is extremely similar. Using some other open source fonts I put together a font set that could replace the original fonts, at least aesthetically. You can select this font set here:



What I would like to ask you is to use this font set for a while and report if there's any problems you encounter with it (missing characters, accents, things like that).

What I am looking for in the open fonts is that they provide at least the same amount of character support as the original fonts. So, if you encounter an issue using the "open" fontset, please check if the same problem exists using the "original" fontset first. If it does, don't report the issue please. If the issue is exclusive to the "open" fontset, then do report it.

You also don't have to report issues with line-height, text boxes being too small or big and things like that. These can easily be corrected if I decide to replace the fonts.

Note though, neither the "original" or "open" font sets are unicode. Very few open source fonts have full unicode support unfortunately, so please don't report issues that are solely down to that. A "unicode" fontset is also available in the skin. It looks like pants imo, but there just aren't any viable alternatives.

If I can establish that the open fonts provide no major problems, then I might consider replacing the original fonts.

[Reynald]

Hello Jeroen,
I noticed that the images of weather are shift in time Is what in weather conditions ( pack dr toxic) ? I have one day of timing delay when it rains I had picture after day.
And would it be possible to have the weather with one week more?

[Jeroen]

Hello Jeroen,
I noticed that the images of weather are shift in time Is what in weather conditions ( pack dr toxic) ? I have one day of timing delay when it rains I had picture after day.

Should be fixed on Git.

And would it be possible to have the weather with one week more?

Yes that's possible and I plan to add this and other weather functions. But it will be for after the Gotham final release and pretty low priority.

[Jeroen]

Pushed a commit to Git that should show the first upcoming scheduled recording in the upper right notification area. It should look something like this:



I can't test timers in the PVR Demo add-on, so hopefully everything shows up correctly. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be an infolabel with just the time of the next recording. Maybe I'll add the full date and time later even though it looks bad, as now the current time could be mistaken for the time of the recording.

When you're playing music or video (and have media overlays enabled in skin settings) the "now playing info" will take precedence over the next recording info. Not really sure how I feel about that yet, but that's how it is for now.

[Reynald]

Ok, great, thank you

[Namekkural]

Btw. What's the cloud symbol mean? The one that's mixed with an arrow or something?! I always have that next to my clock.

[spoco2]

Btw. What's the cloud symbol mean? The one that's mixed with an arrow or something?! I always have that next to my clock.

It's to do with the weather.

If it's showing that, you don't have weather enabled. I didn't use to ever have it enabled, so I had the same thing, but then I discovered you can have weather sourced from the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, so I can have accurate weather, so have it on now.

(US based weather services are always really out of whack with reality.)

The skin should probably not show any icon there if you don't have weather enabled.

[spoco2]

Just tried installing the latest version from github (onto Gotham RC1) and got a 'dependency not met' error.

Can't see anything in the log file though, so I don't know what's causing it.

[Jeroen]

The only thing that could have caused this is I bumped the version number for fanart grabber. Maybe the updated version hasn't been submitted or accepted to the Gotham repo yet. Try to install that add-on manually, see the first post for the github repo.

[Jeroen]

- the default background is sometimes long to load (i am on pi though...) which means having a black background while waiting for the background to load

Thanks, I'm going to do some tweaking to transition animations that will hopefully make things a bit smoother on the Pi.

Turns out no tweaking to the animations had any substantial effect.

reFocus puts a shaded, semi-transparent .png file over the backgrounds / fanart and then colorizes it. For some reason the Pi really struggles on loading that image. I tried reducing the resolution and quality of the image. And while that did speed it up some, I decided I'm not going down the road of using platform specific code or textures.

Luckily, some more testing showed the slow loading is pretty much gone for me when the skin is actually compiled instead of running the uncompressed version found on Github. It's still a Pi so it's never going to be perfect, but it's much smoother and seamless for me now.

So, my advice to Pi users: compile the skin, zip it and then install from the zip, or wait for a stable pre-built skin release. Build scripts are located in the root of the skin folder. You will need TexturePacker to compile skins.
It's not ideal if you want to keep up with the version on Github I guess, but using a compiled build has always been the way "it's supposed to be" anyway.

I have uploaded a compiled test build here:

reFocus(Pi-test)

You can install this alongside your current version (it will not copy over your skin settings, it is just meant for performance testing), it will be listed as reFocus (pi test).

I do not intend to provide compiled builds other than milestone releases.

edit: make sure you have the latest version of fanart grabber installed (0.13.0), otherwise you will get a "dependencies not met" error when installing the skin.

[Jeroen]

Something I've noticed with 'recommended episodes' is that it always defaults to list view. After every update to the data or after a reboot, I have to reset the view to slide. This doesn't happen in 'new episodes' which keeps its view setting. I wasn't sure if this is a skin or system issue.

I'm not sure either, but I can't think of anything at skin level that would dictate different behaviour from "normal" nodes. Will try to find out.

Update after talking to Unfledged about this. The reload property in the onclick action of the home menu button is the cause of this.

Changing the onclick from:

PHP Code:

<onclick>ActivateWindow(Videos,plugin://service.library.data.provider?type=recommendedmovies&amp;reload=$INFO[Window(10000).Property(recommendedmovies)],return)</onclick> 


to:

PHP Code:

<onclick>ActivateWindow(Videos,plugin://service.library.data.provider?type=recommendedmovies,return)</onclick> 


will keep the selected viewtype. Basically every time the reload takes place, the URL changes so XBMC treats it like a new folder, thus applying the default viewtype as a result.

Unfortunately removing the reload property from the link also means the container will not get reloaded automatically, obviously. You will need to exit and re-enter the window to get a refreshed list. Especially when watching episodes, to me that is a big negative.

So I'm afraid this will go into the "will not fix" drawer for now. If you can live with the content not getting refreshed automatically you can of course mod this yourself. Using a Container.Refresh tied to a timer could be possible, but that's awfully hackery and certainly not real-time.

If I think of something else I'll look at this again. A fix within the add-on was not going to be easy according to Unfledged.