[niamu]

Fixed the bugs mentioned by Rotten and username145.

@bigbodiehard, there is already "end time" displayed in the OSD. I am not going to have custom home items, mostly because I can't think of a way to make that pretty. Every home item currently has an icon, but that wouldn't be true for a custom home item. It would be messy and I'd rather not put in the effort. Maybe for XBMC Gotham I'll do more stuff, but right now I'd just like to have a working basic skin for Frodo.

[niamu]

I've been implementing Elbert's skin.widgets pull request and found that all my bug fixes for the overlays on the home screen have been broken again. I've looked into fixing it, but it's not making much sense to me. If Elbert figures out how to fix the overlay issues, then I will finish implementing his code.

Peripherals dialogs have been mostly coded. I coded them blind though and haven't been able to test if the display correctly. If people could test this and provide screenshots of any display issues I can get those fixed up.

The only other remaining bit of work that I have is to complete the "Light Mode" list view option for users who only want to browse in list view everywhere.

I'll probably submit to the development repo in the next couple of days and providing there aren't too many problems that still need attention, I'll submit to the official repo shortly afterwards.

[niamu]

"Light Mode" with just list view is now configurable in Skin Settings under General.

Unless anyone else notices any glaring omissions, I think I'm going to call this feature complete.

[da-anda]

what I miss is a solution for the case that one doesn't use the video library and thus doesn't have a movies and tv-shows node, or if one doesn't want such a node. In any case empty nodes are of no use. I know you can hide some of them in skin settings, but I was not able to hide tv-shows f.e..

And if it's possible, you could add the "pictures" node (and probably also programs) to the main menu in case live-tv is disabled or some other node (like tv-shows) is not used/empty.

Other things I noticed:

• where is the file-manager?
  
• there are still a lot of Confluence icons left that just don't fit for nbox
  
• in movies view, when the ".." item is hovered, the icon on the left where normally the poster is, is a white icon on white background
  
• If I change the sorting to f.e. rating, date added, I would be good if I could also see this information. So probably instead of showing the year right of the movie name, switch this to the info currently sorted by
  
• the fullscreen OSD is inconsistent (endtime in movies compared to liveTV, position of a/v settings icons vs audio viz icons)
  

It'll also be nice if one could have custom shortcuts (addons, favourites, ...) on the right side where currently the recently added items are shown. Similar to what Xeebo, Xperience1080, Confluence, ... have. So a initially empty grid one could fill with custom shortcuts.

edit: I used the nbox.master.zip from github for this test, but it might not be the most recent version I guess, because I neither had a "light" option nor did the peripherals popup show up.

[niamu]

Thanks for pointing these out da-anda. I've been looking at this for far too long so it's easy to miss things.

what I miss is a solution for the case that one doesn't use the video library and thus doesn't have a movies and tv-shows node, or if one doesn't want such a node. In any case empty nodes are of no use. I know you can hide some of them in skin settings, but I was not able to hide tv-shows f.e..

And if it's possible, you could add the "pictures" node (and probably also programs) to the main menu in case live-tv is disabled or some other node (like tv-shows) is not used/empty.

Hiding the "films", "tv shows" and "music" menus can all be done in Skin Settings. Hiding "live tv" is simply a matter of disabling it in the Live TV settings menu. I assume that if it is enabled that you want it to be seen.

It has been brought up a number of times that pictures, programs or other custom menus should be available in the main menu. The problem with this is the limitations that are involved with metadada to show. Examples:

• Pictures has no extra infolabels on the Home screen to show recent pictures or how many pictures are in your library. So it would be a very boring menu to look at by comparison. Nothing more than a big button to take you to the Pictures page. The same is true for Programs and a few others.
  
• Custom menus is an idea that has been brought up a few times before, but the problem with it is what icon to display with the button? I suppose I could code a menu to have them select from a range of icons, but suffice to say that all of that is an extremely involved coding process and something I'd prefer to tackle for XBMC Gotham. Baby steps.
  

where is the file-manager?

The File Manager is indeed missing. My mistake. I'll code that up. Thanks for noticing.

there are still a lot of Confluence icons left that just don't fit for nbox

I bow to your expertise on the icons. If you have a list of them that you'd like changed I'll definitely work on that. I know that the main ones that still bother me are the round radio buttons. I didn't pay much attention to the state of the icons when I picked up the skin from Tree_Jammer so I hadn't even realized what icons were his and what icons were part of Foundation.

in movies view, when the ".." item is hovered, the icon on the left where normally the poster is, is a white icon on white background

If only everyone ran this skin with the parent folders turned off. I'll look into fixing that up.

If I change the sorting to f.e. rating, date added, I would be good if I could also see this information. So probably instead of showing the year right of the movie name, switch this to the info currently sorted by

Displaying the sorting data instead of the year is a great idea. I'll definitely look into that. Should be a simple fix.

the fullscreen OSD is inconsistent (endtime in movies compared to liveTV, position of a/v settings icons vs audio viz icons)

The dreaded OSD... Yeah, I'll touch up those inconsistencies. Fortunately I last rewrote the OSD to keep all of it's common components in one place so that shouldn't take long to fix.

I used the nbox.master.zip from github for this test, but it might not be the most recent version I guess, because I neither had a "light" option nor did the peripherals popup show up.

I think you must have been using an older version as the new version definitely has the Peripheral dialogs and the Light Mode working. Personally, I run git on all of the XBMC machines I test on so I can just pull the latest version and refresh my skin.

Thanks a lot for your attention to detail.

[sav25]

I'm finding the text a little hard to see at times, for example, when I select a film and it says "loading" (or something like that) it's white text on a bright green background that is a bit hard to make out. I know it's the style so maybe I should just bugger off (LOL) but just feedback.

Also, is there a change log, and a way to see if i'm using the latest version?

[gabsaoleo]

Ouch, the view for music videos looks awful. I'd rather stick to the episodes view. Also, when you highlight a video, we could see the artist fanart.
I think episodes view for music videos would look really better since music videos have no cover, except concerts which are not natively supported by XBMC, I guess.

See you.

[da-anda]

It has been brought up a number of times that pictures, programs or other custom menus should be available in the main menu. The problem with this is the limitations that are involved with metadada to show.

I don't think missing meta data of pictures and programs are an issue - we don't need them if we have the ability to show addon shortcuts, shortcuts to favourites, playlists etc instead of the "recently added" stuff. So sort of like the "addon slots" you can have in confluence at the bottom, but only more improved like it's possible in Xeebo or Xperience1080 (they are not limited to just addons). With this feature in, you could use the layout of the "settings" menu item and simply allow the users to add links to their favourite picture playlists, addons or programs/scripts. Fit's perfectly with the design. But this is just an idea.

@perpherals
The file cache of XBMC played tricks on me. After deleting the cached zip file from %profile%/addons/packages/ it installed the updated git version and the peripherals dialog showed just nicely. Working great. The only thing that's a bit "ugly" (which is also the case in Confluence) is that you can't get to the "OK" button in the device overview by pressing down. Instead you have to press left or right. Changing the item list to a group list in this dialog should probably solve it I have heard, but I have no idea of skinning.

@parent folder icon
well, I know it's ugly from a visual point of view, but if you have a remote with limited button set and miss a back button it's mandatory.


Things I noticed while using it on my RaspberryPi via CEC and some other wishes

• it performs really well on the PI, congratulations!
  
• I'm missing a OSD keyboard in the search dialog. If you don't want to show it permanently in cases one has a keyboard, you could simply add a small icon left of the input field to toggle the OSD keyboard and give it focus. But I think usually the setting Setting->System->Input devices->"Remote control sends keyboard presses" is used to turn the OSD keyboard on and off (although I don't really understand what this setting really means)
  
• It would be nice to be able to group "movies" and "tv-shows" in one "video" node, like it's the case in Confluence. That would give one the possibility to show other main menu items instead (in case you manage to add my proposal above and bring the pictures and programs to main menu). Having this "Videos" node would also allow users that don't use the library but rely on UPNP file shares to use this skin in a nice way (I know, all the possibilities in XBMC are a nightmare to consider ). If you want to give such a "Videos" node a try you could have a look at Xeebo about the "submenu items" to add.
  

Boy, I really love that skin. You did a great work with finishing tree_jammers vision!

edit: will create a list of icons that are still form Confluence

[sav25]

+1 to de anda's comment around custom menus. I personally think that the quartz reloaded skin shows exactly how this could work. ..but hey, I'm not the one having to spend time coding it so it's totally down to the dev to decide

[Dec64]

When i try to update to the latest version of the skin, it works except it only shows "films" and "tv shows" on the right at the main menu. the older version from github i was using worked fine. This one seems to have reverted to a very old version some how, even tho i deleted the files in addons folder. perhaps i am missing something? Also you can no longer press left, to bring up favourites. Have i missed something i need to delete to load the new version?

[gabsaoleo]

I love custom menues. We miss that since we don't have that feature in most skins. I found only 2 skins with custom menu support so far.

[da-anda]

Just found a bug: If you press "right" in the movie info window the focus is gone and trapped.

[niamu]

Custom menu support is not coming in this Frodo release. Sorry all, but it is just too much to add and a complete shift in project scope. XBMC Gotham changes to this skin may bring this support. Either way, this is definitely version 2.0 stuff. There's a reason so few skins have this support... it's not easy.

@sav25, I've updated the dialog to have a bit of a drop-shadow so it should be easier to read now.

@da-anda, I've updated the movie info and album info views to fix that bug among other updates addressing your noted issues. I've also cleaned up many (not all) of the default Confluence icons so there are only a few remaining that I need to change.

The File Manager still hasn't been coded.

[Martijn]

Thanks Martijn, I did miss that. I'll investigate further, although at this point I feel so close to a final release that maybe I'll just skip the development repo. We'll see.

As you noticed the more people test the more small issues pop-up
It's nearly impossible to get it right the first time.
Still have fully tried it myself though

[username145]

Small bug: If you make a PVR recording timer for a show that is currently airing, then open up the EPG "now" view type, the "recording" text under the "status" column for that show is displayed twice/overlapped

Wonderful work as always