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v17 [ALPHA] Estuary - Kodis new default skin
#31
Just got Estuary up and running.
1st impressions:
Very fast ,sleek and well laid out.
Love the ability to choose themes.

Will continue to familiarize myself with it.
Thanks for your wonderful work. This is very impressive.
Congratulations to all involved.
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#32
Btw, while this is being in a full functional state for month and has been tested by team members for month, I suspect that we get the full potential the nearer we get to Kryptons release.
There are still some improvements, we want to make to the core, to make things far better.
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#33
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?).
Addons I wrote &/or maintain:
OzWeather (Australian BOM weather) | Check Previous Episode | Playback Resumer | Unpause Jumpback | XSqueezeDisplay | (Legacy - XSqueeze & XZen)
Sorry, no help w/out a *full debug log*.
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#34
Thanks. Forgive me that I won´t get into every point you made, but I will consider them all. Some of them are valid, some of them are, as already mentioned, core limitations / bugs though which I wont be able to fix with pure skinning work.

Just some small remarks:

- Skin settings might get more exposed again after the settings rework (already PR´d). I agree that it feels to hidden.

- More support for our resource add-ons is planned. It makes sense if the default skin shows how to use them properly.

- Moving scanning etc to top center does not work out that well because it has to be either left- or right-aligned in order to not look too hectic.

- Everyone in our team wants infodialog/contextmenu for widgets, too Smile It needs some major refactoring in core code though to get that done, and no promises if/when that will happen

Also, just for clarity, the skin is far from being final. It was written 100% from scratch and I am sure that a lot of small bugs will pop up in the process, and lot of areas might get a rework.
Donate: https://kodi.tv/contribute/donate (foundation), 146Gr48FqHM7TPB9q33HHv6uWpgQqdz1yk (BTC personal)
Estuary: Kodis new default skin - ExtendedInfo Script - KodiDevKit
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#35
Very very nice.

First impression: very fast, great home screen. In my opinion something to improve in OSD VIDEO and Music information.

Regards
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#36
(2016-03-01, 01:29)Razze Wrote: Btw, while this is being in a full functional state for month and has been tested by team members for month, I suspect that we get the full potential the nearer we get to Kryptons release.
There are still some improvements, we want to make to the core, to make things far better.

Congrats to all involved. Yes, thats good news.

So is this how it will look, is this 100% finished skin and graphics?
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#37
@un1versal - pretty sure it's very much not finished as phil65 says 'it's far from being final'. Still early days for Krypton and I am sure plenty of tweaks, fixes and improvements to come, but it's very impressive already I think!

@phil65 thanks for reading and best of luck with it as it goes forward and gets exposure - will be so nice to see all those Kodi articles appearing with nice new clothes in the future!
Addons I wrote &/or maintain:
OzWeather (Australian BOM weather) | Check Previous Episode | Playback Resumer | Unpause Jumpback | XSqueezeDisplay | (Legacy - XSqueeze & XZen)
Sorry, no help w/out a *full debug log*.
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#38
@bossanova

Theres a PR already up https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/pull/9235 hence I asked what I asked.
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#39
I know Kodi is aimed at a 10 foot interface but as a default skin mouse should work fluently or first time users/testers will be driven off. I know if I was installing Kodi for the first time to check it out and my mouse didn't work then it wouldn't live long on my hard drive. The cursor/pointer could use improvement but that's trivial. In PVR guide timeline view there is no way to scroll up/down with a mouse, the scroll wheel scrolls left/right. There needs to be up/down clickable arrows or what would be cool is if the mouse wheel is moved while the pointer is over guide listings it scrolls left/right while if the pointer is over the station name/logo it scrolls up/down. This has been an on going issue with Confluence and other skins. Hopefully that while the skin is in active development it would be trivial to fix this, I am not a skinner so I really don't know what is involved.
If I have been of help, please add to my reputation as a way of saying thanks, it's free.
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#40
Amazing skin, very impressed here, great work guys.

One small wish though.
I would love to have subtitle download even more easily on hand.

reFocus has a very clever, easy and fast way to do it: you just press ok and this screen shows up:
Image
3 * Nvidia Shield + Synology NAS DS218+ LG 77CX6LA + Genelec + RasPi/rAudio + Adam T5V + T7V + T10S - ArcoLinux
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#41
This looks great @phil65 really good work and will make a big difference to new user's first impressions of Kodi.

A bit OT, but might be worth coupling this new skin with a new instance wizard - prompting users to add their own media? May also help to encourage the impression that addons are NOT just what Kodi is about.
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#42
(2016-03-01, 11:36)Raitsa Wrote: Amazing skin, very impressed here, great work guys.

One small wish though.
I would love to have subtitle download even more easily on hand.

reFocus has a very clever, easy and fast way to do it: you just press ok and this screen shows up:
That is a great approach to OSD. I know re-Focus, but never actually played a video with it apparently Smile
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#43
(2016-03-01, 11:36)Raitsa Wrote: Amazing skin, very impressed here, great work guys.

One small wish though.
I would love to have subtitle download even more easily on hand.

reFocus has a very clever, easy and fast way to do it: you just press ok and this screen shows up:
Image

I'm absolutely agree with you.
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#44
I'm running OSMC with Krypton Alpha.
Is there any other way to test Estuary than waiting on them to patch it in? Zip file somewhere?
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#45
@Smultie
https://www.dropbox.com/s/to239z90ar44qk...y.zip?dl=0
https://mega.nz/#!fcVEhJoL!CbNGIXNi-zgdY...AP60heK0m4

i asked gmc to include the pr request in the osmc build krypton builds
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[ALPHA] Estuary - Kodis new default skin9