[Jeroen]

Well, I installed manually by unzipping and uploading. Not sure what happened there.

You don't have (the latest version of) one or more of the required add-ons installed.

Overall, very slick! Love the new look for the skin, except....I really, really miss the transparent home menu items. Not at all a fan of the new blue column that covers 1/4 of the home screen, along with the slightly-different-shade-of-blue menu item background on each menu item row Bring back the white text with no menu item backgrounds and I'd be a happy camper again

Not going to happen, sorry.

Another odd thing--in the TV Shows banner view, many of the shows have the network flag missing. About half. Some are fine though. I was expecting all or none, but not half!

There's a lot of TV channels in the world. I'll won't be able to do something about it if you don't specify.

One other oddity....is there any way to disable the thing at the top that says how many items are being shown, and how they're sorted? I really don't need to know that info, and it's distracting

No, there's no option for that.

[canadave]

Another odd thing--in the TV Shows banner view, many of the shows have the network flag missing. About half. Some are fine though. I was expecting all or none, but not half!

There's a lot of TV channels in the world. I'll won't be able to do something about it if you don't specify.

Sorry, I didn't specify because I had all of the logos visible in the last version of reFocus, and I thought it might just be an obvious bug due to the changeover to Gotham.

The only shows that currently have a visible logo:

Agatha Christ's Poirot (ITV1)
American Horror Story (FX)
Kath and Kim (ABC, Australia Broadcasting Corporation)
Skyland (France 2)
Trailer Park Boys (Showcase)

The rest of the shows I have are missing logos (the vast majority). They include many shows from the BBC, FOX, HBO, NBC, MNN, Showtime, CBS, and a bunch of others that I can't recall offhand. Some shows include: Fawlty Towers, Misfits, Miranda, New Girl, Flight of the Conchords, Community, and The Young Ones.

Also, strangely, several of the shows were missing plot and title information. I did a video clean library, which did nothing, and then did a refresh on each of these shows, which restored the proper information.

[Jeroen]

Sorry, I didn't specify because I had all of the logos visible in the last version of reFocus, and I thought it might just be an obvious bug due to the changeover to Gotham.

The only shows that currently have a visible logo:

Agatha Christ's Poirot (ITV1)
American Horror Story (FX)
Kath and Kim (ABC, Australia Broadcasting Corporation)
Skyland (France 2)
Trailer Park Boys (Showcase)

The rest of the shows I have are missing logos (the vast majority). They include many shows from the BBC, FOX, HBO, NBC, MNN, Showtime, CBS, and a bunch of others that I can't recall offhand. Some shows include: Fawlty Towers, Misfits, Miranda, New Girl, Flight of the Conchords, Community, and The Young Ones.

The network logos are the exact same ones as in the previous releases. No more, no less. All of those , except maybe MNN are included. I can't reproduce a problem here. If you go into the video information screen, what does it say the studio is there?

Also, strangely, several of the shows were missing plot and title information. I did a video clean library, which did nothing, and then did a refresh on each of these shows, which restored the proper information.

Very strange. Skins really don't have anything to do with scanning of library info.

[wex101]

Wow I became so excited when I saw this Refocus release! I loved the original but couldn't stick with it due to some lacking features and just difficult usability. This skin is absolutely perfect now!

I am having a strange issue with the Gotham release today. Only movie widgets will load, TV Shows and Music are selected in the settings but when I scroll up and down the home menu the movie widget stays and the music and TV Show widget don't show up.

Can anyone replicate this? What might be the issue?

[Jeroen]

It's most likely not an issue, the widgets don't change upon changing the main menu selection. The widgets are in what I refer to as shelf and are placed next to each other in a horizontal list.

[noparanoia]

I don't have any technical issue, I'm just wondering about the left blue background on the homescreen. I only use 3 sections in the menu ("Movies", "TV Shows" and "Settings") so that's a big bloc for just 3 items. It may be nice to be able to remove it or change the transparency.

And thanks for this well designed skin!

[canadave]

I don't have any technical issue, I'm just wondering about the left blue background on the homescreen. I only use 3 sections in the menu ("Movies", "TV Shows" and "Settings") so that's a big bloc for just 3 items. It may be nice to be able to remove it or change the transparency.

And thanks for this well designed skin!

Jeroen answered this in his reply to my post, and said it's not going to go away.

Jeroen, I'm sorry, I know you're the boss and it's your skin and all, and I know an extraordinary amount of hard work on your part has made it happen And I've ALWAYS loved reFocus. But I have to confess, I don't really understand why we went from having a wonderful full-screen view of our fanart on the home page, with each menu item standing alone as text with no background at all, to suddenly having a massive monolithic blue column that obscures almost a third of the fanart that's being displayed.

[mortstar]

Jeroen, a small bug I've found in the add-on settings side-menu. The Auto-Update, Notifications and Hide Foreign toggles do not change to show when they are enabled.

Jeroen answered this in his reply to my post, and said it's not going to go away.

Jeroen, I'm sorry, I know you're the boss and it's your skin and all, and I know an extraordinary amount of hard work on your part has made it happen And I've ALWAYS loved reFocus. But I have to confess, I don't really understand why we went from having a wonderful full-screen view of our fanart on the home page, with each menu item standing alone as text with no background at all, to suddenly having a massive monolithic blue column that obscures almost a third of the fanart that's being displayed.

Nobody is stopping you from editing the skin to your liking. You've got access to the original design code, which you prefer, and this new one. It might take some time to learn but you could see it as a chance to learn a new skill.

From what has been said multiple times in this thread, what you want isn't going to happen. Rather than re-phrase the question in multiple different ways, you could help yourself to the skin you want.

[canadave]

I know absolutely nothing about skin coding, but I will take under advisement your suggestion that I devote hours/days to that endeavour so that I can figure out how to modify the skin to remove a single blue bar. I thought it might be more efficient to simply inquire about the design decision, and I don't think it's beyond the realm of rudeness to ask out of curiosity if Jeroen had a reasoning behind the decision.

Incidentally, I only asked once about whether there was a way to restore the original design. In my last post, I was merely taking advantage of answering the other person's repeat of my original question to elaborate that I was hoping Jeroen might be able to shed some light on the decision--a decision that seems curious to me (and others, by the way, since I've received several PM's from people who also are confused as to why the change was made).

---

The network logos are the exact same ones as in the previous releases. No more, no less. All of those , except maybe MNN are included. I can't reproduce a problem here. If you go into the video information screen, what does it say the studio is there?

I just discovered the issue. When I installed by copying the skin.refocus-master folder to my ATV2, it seems to have not copied a whole bunch of files for some reason, including the missing network flags. I'll try installing again.

[Jeroen]

Closed until further notice.

[Jeroen]

Sorry for closing the thread for a while. I had to take some time to think about what I wanted to say about the way I see the development of this skin move on because I think there's a discrepancy between my view on it and what some people may expect of it.

But instead of going on a big rant here about some of the things that have a demotivating effect, I concluded I'd rather try to do a better job of managing expectations and keep some of my annoyances to myself as it ultimately is only wasted negative energy.

I know it sounds vague but I'm just going to leave it at that.

Canadave, this wasn't / isn't aimed at you directly.

[removed151214]

Very glad to hear it - when you closed the thread i was genuinely concerned a fantastically desigmed skin might be dropped because its author has very specific ideas about its design (which is absolutely the way it should, even if those design ideas are not always widely accepted.)

I have a band of dedicated testers of my script.skinshortcuts script - last week I switched them to a modded version of your new reFocus for testing of new features because it matches my own design asthetics so much more closely than any other skin (even one I designed myself!). I'm very glad I don't have to switch back so quickly. Not only do I now use your skin as a basis for testing, my plan is to switch my families primary tv to a modded version of it with the next update of my script.

I'm genuinely pleased you're continuing development of this fantastic skin, and hope you have the strength to ignore any more ill-informed detractors (both end users and XBMC team members who would much rather go on a rant than getting facts, or just, y'know, fixing it himself which is, let's face it, the only solution - whether you based that fix on my code or wether you have your own solution Martijn. And yes, I found your response deeply offensive, for no other reason than you complaining about something that ultimately its going to be up to you to fix as your script will deprecrate any I've contributed to, whether or not I've included the fix in Library Data provider - my apologies Jeroen, but I'm still pissed off about Martijns incredibly rude reponse) going forward.

[henrava]

Jeroen, I would just tell you not to discourage.
Your work with the skin is first class, and you have my gratitude and that of many others
It 's always happened, with the wonderful skin Alaska from Hitcher, with the whole series of Aeon, etc.
You can give people 100, 110 will ask. Sure as death.
Continue with your ideas, if someone wants to change something, he will learn (like myself).
Respect. (and sorry for bad english).

[spoco2]

Just to reiterate that during the time that reFocus wasn't being updated, I tried most every other skin for xbmc.

I returned to a partially working reFocus over any of them because it just provides the absolute cleanest experience out of any of them.

A skin for grown ups if you will

[canadave]

Jeroen, thanks for re-opening the thread, and I'm glad to hear your comments weren't aimed at me. I hope you understand that we all (or at least, I know I do) fully understand that reFocus is yours to do with whatever you want to do. If you want to take reFocus and make it all purple polka dots and rainbow stripes with hexagons everywhere, feel free As a designer, though, I hope you'll continue to be open to end user feedback about how our experience with your skin is feeling.

One final note: you used the word "expectations"....I would certainly hope no one has any "expectations" about what you're doing with reFocus. I certainly harbour no such expectations. I may have some questions, but it goes without saying that yours is the final say on the skin's design, and no one has any right to expect anything at all in terms of what you do with it.

I hope you will find a way to rid yourself of whatever demotivations may have seeped in, and will continue to happily develop reFocus