Wow! @
phil65 @
Piers and whomever else, this work will be very much appreciated by many for a long time to come.
I'm not sure if you're yet looking for nitpicks/feedback, and you're perhaps well aware of these things, but here are some (likely premature) thoughts which you may take or leave as you wish (and some are of course more general kodi limitations rather than this skin per se, it's just hard to separate those out):
- Home screen is great! So nice to have it all on one screen like that and the animation etc seems just the right level of swishy.
- I am wondering about navigation to those top row icons on the right though - I'm testing with a very small library here at work, so it's hard to get a full impression, but it feels a bit odd to get to those you have to navigate off the main vertical menu to the right, 'over' the media thumbnails to get to those buttons (i.e. you push right, then up). Since at least the home screen 'blade' menu has died a much deserved death, perhaps using left on the main menu could take you across to those icons as a short cut? Although that may be a UX no no as you wouldn't be able to do that where the blade still exists I guess. It just feels slightly convoluted getting there.
- It would be so super awesome if you could bring up info/context menu on the media thumbs directly on the home screen (e.g. to read plot/update art/manage etc)
- The overlays over the thumbs of in progress and year/rating are nice, but could they be configurable at all? I personally don't care for ratings and find they can negatively impact the experience of choosing something to watch. I'd rather see UHD/HD/SD there, for example
- Skin specific settings are still very undiscoverable being hidden under a what looks like a setting/attribute rather than having their own actual section. I've seen even people using Kodi for years miss that.
- I realise Pictures doesn't (yet?) use a library approach like the rest, but the sudden jump to a full screen image instead of thumbs/iconography there is jarring for me (this is assuming you have a library set up with media added etc I suppose before that it's all pictures?)
- Addons - some indication of addons that are currently downloading would be nice while browsing those. I hit install on one, and then couldn't tell if it was working or not, so did it again and then got the cancel download message.
- A longer weather provider text just gets chopped off on the home screen vertical menu, does not look as neat as the rest
- Any chance of animated weather icons? Or is that too heavy for standard? (Actually this is probably done by an image addon now, I suppose? Will those work with Estuary? I just tried and can't see them animating)
- Now playing - Would it be possible to make info default to metadata instead of plot - I hate risking spoilers and use that view primarily to check metadata.
- Now Playing - Bookmarks accessible but not subs/download sub? I would have thought subs are in much greater use.
- Seeking - not seeing a seek bar with times using big seek (up/down) - is that intentional?
- It feels like there should be enough room on a 10 foot interface for both the scanning info and the normal time/weather display - the central area is not really being used? It's probably hard given the variable length of the scanning info, but it's a shame that it gets rid of the time display particularly.
- I tell you what though, the more time spent looking around, the more impressive it generally is. You seem to have nailed the features/speed/simplicity trade offs *very* well. I'm very much looking forward to using this and supect it's going to tempt me on to Krypton betas long before the final thing comes out...I'm normally pretty cautious but this seems too good to be missing out on!
Of course later I can hack many of these things in to my own version should they not suit the general world, but can't hurt to ask/think about I hope!
Once again, lovely work and well done, thank you for your efforts! I'll have to get to adapting my own addons to fit this skin properly (seems like some of the weather properties have changed again maybe?).