2017-07-16, 16:35
INTRODUCTION
Grid takes a minimalistic, sensible and performance driven approach, something people who know about my previous work on Focus and reFocus will probably recognise. The name of the skin is derived from one of it’s main design / development principles where all elements are laid out on a virtual grid to enforce a visual consistency. When I was watching / listening to Tron while coding one evening, it became obvious to me what the name of the skin was going to be.
COMPATIBILITY
Grid is available for Kodi 17 / Krypton and Kodi 18 / Leia. You are currently in the Krypton release thread. Please make sure you report any issues in the correct release thread.
Grid's version number reflects the Kodi release it was released for:
- version 1.x.x: Kodi 17 / Krypton
- version 2.x.x: Kodi 18 / Leia
FAQ
Please take note of these here before posting.
REQUIRED & SUPPORTED ADD-ONS
More info on the add-ons required and/or supported by Grid can be found here. Please read this before posting any issues.
SPECIAL THANKS
Months before even showing anything of the skin I put together a small team of beta testers, which has been one of the best decisions I ever made with regards to skinning for Kodi. It allowed me to share Grid and get feedback but still work on the skin “in peace and quiet”.
Therefore I would like to send out huge thanks for their time, effort and dedication spent on this project to the following people, in alphabetical order:
- BigDaddyRal
- Donderstraal
- FrissonReynald
- KOKONUTCREME
- loggio
- lstar337
- monkeyboyohyeah
- Rafał Wójcik
- Slurrp
This skin has gotten better because of you and developing it has been even more fun because of you too. Cheers guys
MORE THANKS
I, and the whole skinning community, owe a lot to many people. A couple of them immediately come to mind with regards to Grid seeing the light of day.
- BobCratchett, thanks for putting up with my crazy ideas and requests (again) and offering such clear help and advice on Skin Shortcuts;
- marcelveldt, thanks for creating Skin Helper. It truly is a great helper that has opened up many new possibilities;
- jurialmunkey, for not only being a talented skinner but also a great help around the skinning dev forum to many people, including yours truly;
- badaas, for creating colorbox. Support for colorbox was added very late in Grid’s development (and I plan to expand the support in the future) but it has already given it such a nice extra touch;
- phil65, I cannot live without KodiDevKit anymore.
And last but not least my love for putting up with all my geek hobbies and projects that take up far too much time.
LANGUAGE SUPPORT
Grid supports Cyrillic (extended), Greek (extended), Hebrew (no rtl support), Latin (extended) and Vietnamese characters. Select the appropriate font for your language in Settings > Interface > Skin > Fonts. Any other language is supported through the Unicode (Arial) fontset, but this comes with compromises in looks and usability.
PLANNED UPDATES & IMPROVEMENTS
- Improvements the the "out of the box experience". As in first launch instructions / menu indicators to help discoverability of features and menus.
- More clear and logical configuration of the widgets. These require changes in the Skin Shortcuts add-on however. Please see my explanation about this here.
GOOD TO KNOW
Widgets
The widgets implementation in Grid takes a bit of a different approach than any skin I am aware of. Please see my explanation about this here.
Expectation management
This skin is not for you if the following things are important to you:
- CD Art, spinning discs;
- At least 10 different viewtypes for every content type;
- A visibility switch for anything you see on screen;
- Loads of animations;
- Details about everything. I don't implement features for the sake of adding features, the same goes for metadata. I really couldn't care less about how much money a movie earned or what it's budget was. And in the odd occasion that I do want to know, I have a smartphone beside me that offers a much better way to obtain that information.
- Logo's everywhere;
- Multiple artwork types per viewtype. It comes down to every viewtype being centered around 1 particular artwork type. A second artwork type is only shown when it makes sense / serves a purpose. That's why you will not see tv show logo's when browsing one particular tv show because....you already know what tv show you're browsing. When you browse your recently added episodes however, having tv show logo's makes sense as it helps you differentiate upon first glance;
- Mouse support. I think the overall design would lend itself quite well for touch operation, with some alterations / additions. So while I may do that in a future version, for now mouse support is not supported;
- Never leave the homescreen;
- You need to see something else everytime you scroll
DOWNLOAD & INSTALL
Grid can be installed using Kodi's built-in add-on browser. For alternate ways of obtaining and installing Grid, please go here.
SCREENSHOTS
Some screenshots from the original OP
watch gallery
CONTRIBUTE
If you enjoy my work and like to show your appreciation, any donation is appreciated greatly.
P.S. To anyone who has donated, please read this post
Mainly relevant to the first view type, would you add an options menu item to hide the image? If the image is hidden, the plot field then expands into its area so that more text can be seen at one time. I imagine this being an option that is not saved (from here anyway). That is, when you move to another show or movie, the image is back.
Thank you Jeroen for 