[icarok99]

https://github.com/jurialmunkey/skin.arc...emenu.json

[olevelo]

The benefit of that is that then you can disable the whole ratings line to get a 3rd line of plot (and if you still want the default/user rating can enable the rating artwork overlay instead)

I think people probably get too caught up in displaying a lot of different ratings when really they aren't much use except for discovering new things to watch. If it's already in your library/in-progress/watchlist then you already know that you want to watch it!

Gotcha! I still think there's plenty of room to have ratings, media info, and get 4 or 5 lines of plot. But I'll definitely play around with things a bit. Maybe one day I'll even watch a movie!

jurialmunkey,

First, thanks for the great skin. Faster and less buggy (at least for me) than titan bingie mod, my previous skin. No offense to achilles - seen him in this thread taking interest too - but for me it was time for something more modern than a netflix style UI anyway. 

Your skin with very minimal customizations is almost perfect for my tastes. I removed the ratings because of exactly what you said -- ratings feel like a silly thing to add in kodi. I really only use ratings when I'm deciding what to add to my kodi media library. By the time a media file is added to my library, it's already made the cut and I know I want to watch it at some point. I'd much rather have the extra line of plot.

And ideally, just about every view would have 4-5 lines of plot (or the equivalent in extended character limit). From a UX perspective, I like longer plot text available immediately at a glance rather than having to (1) select item, (2) scrolling down to wiki, (3) pushing over to get the extended plot outline.

https://imgur.com/IGCrbJm


Thats ...a lot... of navigation to get what I'm after. It makes browsing way less seamless than it could be.  Overall, this is clearly a common, maybe even universal, problem with streaming services such as Amazon Prime making a similarly painful user flow. I count 3-5 clicks with Prime to select the media item, navigate to plot description, and select view description, in order to read more than 1.5 lines of plot description. Their bandaid is to launch a trailer on hover, which is probably great for some people but I'd much rather read 4 lines of text before I decide to watch 3 minutes of trailer. Talk about slow browsing...but maybe that's what they want.

In the bingie skin, this was almost a vanity thing with scraping short plot descriptions - almost one-liners - to fit into the UI and prevent the need for plot scrolling (which I absolutely detest; I read way faster than the scroll and it can never be timed right with natural browsing behaviour. Plot scrolling is plain bad UX). But short plot outlines are a bandaid anyway - they remove most of the helpful description of plot, distilling it down to a short blurb that tells you next to nothing. More vague teaser than plot description.

I know many users are on different sized screens and different devices, and I understand your UI/UX choices, but I use kodi exclusively on a large 4k 16:9 TV so there's plenty of screen real estate for increasing the character limit of plot descriptions while respecting the need for negative space. I don't think a beautiful design and excellent browsing functionality have to be at odds here.

I would like some advice on how to accomplish this, whether it's increasing the number of lines, increasing the max width of the plot text area, or some other way. For my very simple implementation of your skin, I won't get lost in navigation, so hiding or removing the "Home" title (and similar section titles) could be an option for me. Can you point me in the direction of how you would increase the character limit of immediately-visible plot descriptions? 

https://imgur.com/c7Skedi

Your proposed image is almost exactly what I'm looking at doing (I'm undecided about the ratings right now though so would probably keep it optional as is).

[xnothingx]

I'll preface this with making it known I'm doing all of this through my M1 MacBook Pro and not an android box/apple tv. 

I've had nothing but problems trying to setup Arctic Fuse since switching across, specifically with respects to shortcuts causing Kodi to hang completely and requiring forced closing (no log info). 

I'm trying to add additional shortcuts to the main menu to complement the standard Home, Movies, and TV ones. I can add the shortcut to the menubar fine, its once I'm back on the home screen problems begin. As I scroll down the menu to the newly added shortcut, once it gets highlighted everything will either hang there and then, or it'll happen as soon as I click "select" on the shortcut itself. 

I then end up in a bit of a loop trying to remove the shortcut because the settings menu option is down the bottom and requires scrolling through your general menu shortcuts to access. 

Never really had this issue before whether it's been with AuraMod back in the day, Cosmic, or any other skin I've used in the past. 

As it stands it makes AF virtually unusable, which is quite unfortunate because it looks a genuinely top tier skin. 

Not sure if there's anything that can be investigated or done to fix this issue, but thought it may be worth bringing up in the event others may also be experiencing this.

[jurialmunkey]

I'll definitely play around with things a bit. Maybe one day I'll even watch a movie!

HA! Story of my life.

[jurialmunkey]

In the end, I would have found it better not only in terms of design but also functionally if you had generally limited the number to four instead of shortening the playing now info across the board so that it is now often scrolling - the playing now display is generally more valuable to me in terms of information content than the reference to a widget that I know is there anyway. But I can now live with it as it is, thank you in any case for taking care of it.

Not my first choice to shorten now playing but I was forced into it because I realised it was overlapping in some other areas too (e.g. scrollbars ondown). I wouldn't take it as its final form - more of a case of making a change out of necessity now so that it is at least functional while I consider other ways I can approach it.

Btw, big big thanks for the change / option of the back navigation

Yeah I think I finally have it working in a way that gives that bit of extra much needed flexibility for different setup approaches whilst still standardising the behaviour and not becoming too unwieldy or complicated code-wise -- but we shall see, it can become a game of whack-a-mole sometimes!

[derpferd]

2.  This might be due to me using Jellyfin as my backend so essentially my scraper, but my Landscape images are the same as the images shown in Spotlight, except without the Logo.  Is there a way to use a different image so it's not just showing the same image twice (and the logo 3 times!)?

I use Jellyfin as well (backend server, Jellyfin, frontend playout to Kodi) so I'm doing near exactly what you're doing using Jellyfin with Arctic Fuse.

In terms of managing images, I do that in Jellyfin. Changing logos and artwork, it all goes through Jellyfin and is then reflected in Kodi and however each respective skin will display that, in this case Arctic Fuse.

So go into Jellyfin on your computer, go to a respective show or movie, select the 3 dot menu and in the dropdown, select Edit Images. 

This can also be done if you have the Jellyfin app on your phone, which is cool if you're on the couch in front of the TV and want to make quick changes to the artwork right there

All the options for editing images will be there. Background, thumbnail, primary and logo are the main ones I will change though, for the most part, the default selections are just fine

[jurialmunkey]

And ideally, just about every view would have 4-5 lines of plot (or the equivalent in extended character limit). From a UX perspective, I like longer plot text available immediately at a glance rather than having to (1) select item, (2) scrolling down to wiki, (3) pushing over to get the extended plot outline.

Thats ...a lot... of navigation to get what I'm after. It makes browsing way less seamless than it could be. 

Do you have an info button on your remote or another button suitable to act as a plot view button? The number of clicks can be reduced to one with a simple keymap binding.

Map longpress info (or whatever button you want to use) to "ActivateWindow(1113)" and you now have a button which will open the full plot dialog directly from practically anywhere in the skin.
https://kodi.wiki/view/Keymap

I think people really overlook how a few small keymap changes can make a huge difference. This is a much simpler approach to solving this issue which doesn't involve redesigning the entire skin!

My own keymap I map the following longpress actions which makes a huge difference using on a remote with only three action buttons:

Long-press info to "ActivateWindow(1113)" [plot dialog]
Long-press back to "ActivateWindow(shutdownmenu)" [options dialog]
Long-press select to "contextmenu"

I won't get lost in navigation, so hiding or removing the "Home" title (and similar section titles) could be an option for me. Can you point me in the direction of how you would increase the character limit of immediately-visible plot descriptions?

This is not a simple change to make. Believe me, I have considered this type of design many many many times over.

It may seem trivial but removing the header and shifting the skin upwards is a very significant change with far reaching implications for the design and animations of the skin. I know you're thinking, "Oh but it's easy, just drop the header and shift the info panel up" but that only works if you never see any windows other than Home and Library.

There are so many areas in the skin which rely on a consistent header space such as Search, Filtering, OSD, Settings etc. What you are talking about is an almost complete redesign of the entire skin to suit the new dimensions --- or, alternatively, an inconsistent skin which only looks good on home/library and nowhere else.

[Ray10]

Is there a way to disable splash screen of the skin itself (I disabled kodi splash screen in advancedsettings.xml)?

Thanks

[mklod]

Do you have an info button on your remote or another button suitable to act as a plot view button? The number of clicks can be reduced to one with a simple keymap binding.

Map longpress info (or whatever button you want to use) to "ActivateWindow(1113)" and you now have a button which will open the full plot dialog directly from practically anywhere in the skin.
 

I won't get lost in navigation, so hiding or removing the "Home" title (and similar section titles) could be an option for me. Can you point me in the direction of how you would increase the character limit of immediately-visible plot descriptions?

This is not a simple change to make. Believe me, I have considered this type of design many many many times over.

It may seem trivial but removing the header and shifting the skin upwards is a very significant change with far reaching implications for the design and animations of the skin. I know you're thinking, "Oh but it's easy, just drop the header and shift the info panel up" but that only works if you never see any windows other than Home and Library.

There are so many areas in the skin which rely on a consistent header space such as Search, Filtering, OSD, Settings etc. What you are talking about is an almost complete redesign of the entire skin to suit the new dimensions --- or, alternatively, an inconsistent skin which only looks good on home/library and nowhere else.

Thanks for the quick response. The keymap is a fair suggestion, but I'd still prefer to browse with verbose plot descriptions at a glance rather than having to key up the info panel on every single media item I scroll over. 

And actually, afaik I only use Home and Library. As I said, my implementation is very basic. 90+% of the time I am simply browsing TV library or Movie library, sorted by date added.  Can you point me towards the edits I would need to make to test this mod, even if results in an inconsistent skin that looks good only on home/library?

If removing the header is truly a nightmare, maybe decreasing the padding for the current three available lines could get the job done with breaking less things? This wouldn't look as clean, but I'd really like to try out both options. No warranty, I know, just looking for some technical direction on how to tweak it and not asking for you to rework the skin that's clearly had a lot of time and thought put into it already.

https://imgur.com/KM5mG3h

[jurialmunkey]

As a rule I don't give out modding advice in skin threads. It derails the thread away from the skin and turns it into a helpdesk for personal mods.

[theo08]

thanks again for your reply @jurialmunkey

the more i use the skin the more i learn (to love) it

i have a question which might be a bit "exotic". My home assistant sends notifications to kodi when i change volume on my AVR. These notifications are a bit small. Is there any quick hack solution to increase their size by editing some config file of the skin? that would be glorious

[Sathish804]

Hi all, can anyone please advise how to get rid of the back arrow in the content view like in attached screenshot. This back arrow not working properly with back button.

[C.O.D.]

@jurialmunkey Nice idea to put the playing now info into the power menu but when nothing is playing I'm getting this:

[C.O.D.]

"ActivateWindow(1113)" and you now have a button which will open the full plot dialog directly from practically anywhere in the skin

Man, you made my day for the third time in a row: First wikipedia on a button click for the playing now content, then the changed back navigation and now this! How could I have known of the existance of window 1113? Do you have more of those secret tips? 

Thanks and cheers

[CouchGuy]

Can we have an option to disable the up/down navigation button in Spotlight & the time & date at the bottom of options menu? 🙏