[Jeroen]

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 Leia 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

[Jeroen]

The first official Leia release of Grid has been submitted for inclusion on the official Kodi repository and is currently awaiting approval. A beta version is available through my repository add-on, see the first post for details.

[xodi]

The Leia version just appeared in the Kodi repo. I installed and found the "MUSIC" label is missing in the main menu, it's empty, but when I click on the empty place, I can see the submenu "ARTISTS" and "RECENTLY ADDED". When Kodi starts, I only see "GR D" on the screen, the "I" is missing (I mean the top dot of i, which I can see from the screenshot of the OP).

[xodi]

I tried all fonts included in the skin, but none of them support CJK. The only option is Arial. Can you include one font that support CJK?

[xodi]

The bottom menu for a movie, how about moving the "Trailer" and "Youtube Search" menu items from the "More..." to the main menu directly? There are enough space to show both, and I think they are should be used frequently.

[xodi]

For view type "SLIDE", posters for some movies are missing, but they are displayed normally in other skins. When I click "MANAGE..." for a movie (the poster is also missing from this window), in the pop up menu, if I choose "Choose art", the focus is on the "POSTER", and the poster can display normally in the left. So I think it's just a display issue, not the poster issue.

[Jeroen]

I installed and found the "MUSIC" label is missing in the main menu, it's empty, but when I click on the empty place, I can see the submenu "ARTISTS" and "RECENTLY ADDED".

Hmm, seems to be an issue with Skin Shortcuts as the labels used here are provided by the add-on, but will look into it further.

When Kodi starts, I only see "GR D" on the screen, the "I" is missing (I mean the top dot of i, which I can see from the screenshot of the OP).

Look closer

I tried all fonts included in the skin, but none of them support CJK. The only option is Arial. Can you include one font that support CJK?

There aren't that many open source fonts that support CJK. There's Noto Sans, but the filesize of the fontset is huge and even then there are multiple versions for multiple languages. Adding these would lead to the skin growing to hundreds of MB's which is definitely no option. I have thought before about preparing font packages that could be dowloaded separately and easily be added to the skin and provide CJK support that way. But as there aren't any CJK translations for Grid, it has not been high up on my list.

The bottom menu for a movie, how about moving the "Trailer" and "Youtube Search" menu items from the "More..." to the main menu directly? There are enough space to show both, and I think they are should be used frequently.

No, sorry. I want only the main Kodi functions to be used in button row and have similar functions grouped.

For view type "SLIDE", posters for some movies are missing, but they are displayed normally in other skins. When I click "MANAGE..." for a movie (the poster is also missing from this window), in the pop up menu, if I choose "Choose art", the focus is on the "POSTER", and the poster can display normally in the left. So I think it's just a display issue, not the poster issue.

Cannot reproduce this, the posters are showing for me.


Note: please combine posts whenever possible please.

[Jeroen]

I installed and found the "MUSIC" label is missing in the main menu, it's empty, but when I click on the empty place, I can see the submenu "ARTISTS" and "RECENTLY ADDED".

This should be solved by installing the Leia version of Skin Shortcuts.

[rvas18]

The settings menus for addons are not working. It displays just a line that says 0% and a few other characters. I will try to upload a screenshot later, but is there anything I should try first?

[NeilEraser]

The settings menus for addons are not working. It displays just a line that says 0% and a few other characters. I will try to upload a screenshot later, but is there anything I should try first?

I have the same issue, but since I haven't seen anyone else mention it I thought there was something weird in my settings. Latest Windows 10, Leia nightly from a few days ago. I'm at work or I'd post a debug log. I pop into Estuary whenever I need to change an addon setting, then come back to Grid because it's (otherwise) awesome.

[rori]

Yeah, I have the same problem on two systems (Windows 10/Libreelec on Odroid C2). 

[Lenn]

The settings menus for addons are not working. It displays just a line that says 0% and a few other characters. I will try to upload a screenshot later, but is there anything I should try first?

 I have the same issue, on every add-on settings menu.

[Jeroen]

The settings menus for addons are not working. It displays just a line that says 0% and a few other characters. I will try to upload a screenshot later, but is there anything I should try first?

 I have the same issue, on every add-on settings menu.

This issue was resolved in the 2.0.2 beta version. Some navigation issues needed to be resolved too though, which has been done in 2.0.3 which is available through the repository add-on now.

[rori]

The settings menus for addons are not working. It displays just a line that says 0% and a few other characters. I will try to upload a screenshot later, but is there anything I should try first?

 I have the same issue, on every add-on settings menu. 

This issue was resolved in the 2.0.2 beta version. Some navigation issues needed to be resolved too though, which has been done in 2.0.3 which is available through the repository add-on now. 

Thanks! It's working flawlessly now.

[Jeroen]

Grid 2.1.0 (Leia)
Available through the repo add-on. Working towards next official Leia release.

Changes:

• This release introduces hubs for the various library sections. Enable them by adding them to your main menu. Set up the hub sources in the newly added skin settings section
  
• Descriptions now support Hebrew characters
  
• Fix for animated fanart skin setting getting re-enabled at boot
  
• Enable animated artwork in Gallery View
  
• Updated translations
  
• Fix for rating star symbol not displaying in some places
  
• When selecting " browse library" in hub, start in titles / artists node
  
• Hubs disabled by default (may change back again in later release)
  
• Reworked skin settings category menu to indicate currently focused category
  
• Include duration for episodes in containers
  
• Added buttons to clear video hub sources
  
• Fixed a navigation issue in skin settings
  
• Probably more I forgot to list