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Release Mimic 5.x for Krypton
#1
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mim·ic
1. To imitate
Synonyms: resemble, look like, have the appearance of


Introduction

Users of this skin will quickly see the resemblance to two of my favorite skins, Aeon Nox and reFocus. Even as Mimic borrows from both of these skins, my hope is that it will develop into its own style over time. Many thanks to BigNoid for his work on Aeon Nox, on which this skin is based. I've used many of the available skins since discovering XBMC/Kodi, but always returned to one of the Nox variations for its feature set and clear navigation. Also thank you to Jeroen, creator of reFocus, whose clean design and attention to detail were an inspiration for this skin. Mimic also borrows some of the great views from reFocus such as Gallery and BigList. More recently, this skin now "mimics" features from Arctic Zephyr and its mods, fTV, and Phil65's skin.

Usage

Explore the skin settings to customize the menus or change the color theme. You can also view a list of supported addons, and install any you are missing.

Languages

Mimic is now on Transifex. Sign up to translate the skin strings into your preferred language.

https://www.transifex.com/teamxbmc/kodi-skins/

Download/Install

Mimic 5 is available in the Kodi repository. The source is available here: https://github.com/braz96/skin.mimic/tree/krypton_v5

***Note that Mimic 5 is using the developmental version of skin.helper.service that was just released, best to also install marcelveldt's beta repo if you want to test those features. See http://forum.kodi.tv/showthread.php?tid=...pid2460890

If you would like to express your appreciation for this skin, please consider a donation to the XBMC Foundation. http://kodi.tv/contribute/donate/

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#2
Just wanted to give everyone an early heads-up regarding the planned direction for Mimic 5.x. As mentioned in the Mimic 4.x thread, the home screen code has gotten very complex with the huge number of options. This has made it very difficult to maintain so I'm planning on removing many of the home screen options. There will be two menus, horizontal and vertical. Widgets will be displayed all the time and will fill the screen. Here are a couple of screenshots and you can test it out if you'd like using the link below.

Update: I changed the skin ID and name so you can install it alongside Mimic 4.x if you want. Just extract the contents to "skin.mimic18".

https://github.com/braz96/skin.mimic/tree/kodi18


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#3
Would like to test this out. Does this branch require a Kodi nightly?

~Jondar
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#4
(2016-05-16, 09:56)Jondar Wrote: Would like to test this out. Does this branch require a Kodi nightly?

~Jondar
Yes

Sent from my Nexus 6
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#5
looks great @braz... would be awesome if you could enable 2 rows of widget movie posters (as per music screenshots but with movies, not sure yet if you may have already done this)

ok, so Kodi 17 is Krypton I can download from the nightlies, (kodi downloads page) but where do I download Kodi 18 nightlies? ...or are they one in the same?

...shall give it a whirl if you can point me in the right direction braz.

thanks for all your continued commitment.

............................................

EDIT: so presuming I've downloaded kodi 18 if its from the Nightlies download page (even though it states Krypton 17)... I've downloaded Mimic 18 and installed just fine.

I don't know if its just me, but my first thoughts are that its really really fast navigating around, it really zips along!

It seems you have already enabled 2 rows of movie poster widgets for the hoz menu, great stuff, love it... heres the 'but' realise its really early days so not sure if this is a bug or you have just not got around to coding it yet. If I select posters as the widget art, it still shows as square (think square was called default in mimic krypton branch). Would be great if you could enable posters without the square boxes around them (personally I can't stand the square view). Happy to test further once the posters are just posters and not a square grid.

thanks braz, love it !
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#6
am I correct in thinking you have also stripped out the 'combined submenu and main menu' (with the drop downs when using the vertical home menu)?

...if so I am really going to miss that, I found that a great feature. my others users shall not know to press left to find the sub menus, know matter how many times i tell them lol.
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#7
realise your objective is to remove home menu options, to make it easier for you to maintain... so I'm probably just really bugging you now, sorry braz.... also now realised your planning to remove the ability to 'hide the home screen header' I would also 'really miss' this option, I prefer a minimal uncluttered view... to the point where I actually modded my other movie media views to remove the header bar.

hopefully I'm not bugging you, just trying to point out what I would really miss as a user.

thanks agin.
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#8
(2016-05-19, 21:13)stueeey Wrote: looks great @braz... would be awesome if you could enable 2 rows of widget movie posters (as per music screenshots but with movies, not sure yet if you may have already done this)

ok, so Kodi 17 is Krypton I can download from the nightlies, (kodi downloads page) but where do I download Kodi 18 nightlies? ...or are they one in the same?

...shall give it a whirl if you can point me in the right direction braz.

thanks for all your continued commitment.

............................................

EDIT: so presuming I've downloaded kodi 18 if its from the Nightlies download page (even though it states Krypton 17)... I've downloaded Mimic 18 and installed just fine.

I don't know if its just me, but my first thoughts are that its really really fast navigating around, it really zips along!

It seems you have already enabled 2 rows of movie poster widgets for the hoz menu, great stuff, love it... heres the 'but' realise its really early days so not sure if this is a bug or you have just not got around to coding it yet. If I select posters as the widget art, it still shows as square (think square was called default in mimic krypton branch). Would be great if you could enable posters without the square boxes around them (personally I can't stand the square view). Happy to test further once the posters are just posters and not a square grid.

thanks braz, love it !
Yeah, the home screen will probably seem faster now, there are much fewer moving parts. The old home screen had a large number of animations and moving furniture pieces. Many of them have been removed in this version in favor of static furniture.

There is no Kodi 18 yet, so you'll want to be using one of the latest Kodi 17 nightlies with this version. I just wanted to give an early heads-up about what's coming for Kodi 18. I imagine there is going to be a lot of "dissatisfaction" with some of my design decisions. Smile

The "thumbnail view" for widgets, eg squares, is here to stay I'm afraid. It was an easy way to align the widgets regardless of art type. The widget art options in the menu customizer have been updated as well. Poster, Square, and Landscape are gone...they have been replaced with Thumbnail, Poster, Fanart.
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#9
(2016-05-19, 22:16)stueeey Wrote: am I correct in thinking you have also stripped out the 'combined submenu and main menu' (with the drop downs when using the vertical home menu)?

...if so I am really going to miss that, I found that a great feature. my others users shall not know to press left to find the sub menus, know matter how many times i tell them lol.
You'll notice there is a new quick launch menu on the side menu. Mimic uses script.skinshortcuts and I couldn't get the allmenus option that is required for the combined menus to work correctly after adding the quick launch menu. So I removed the combined menu option for now. I will take another look and see if I can prevent the quick launch menu from interfering with it.

This won't be released until Kodi 18, so you have lots of time to train your users. Wink
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#10
(2016-05-19, 22:28)stueeey Wrote: realise your objective is to remove home menu options, to make it easier for you to maintain... so I'm probably just really bugging you now, sorry braz.... also now realised your planning to remove the ability to 'hide the home screen header' I would also 'really miss' this option, I prefer a minimal uncluttered view... to the point where I actually modded my other movie media views to remove the header bar.

hopefully I'm not bugging you, just trying to point out what I would really miss as a user.

thanks agin.
It's no problem, I appreciate the input. I likely won't be able to meet everyone's needs with this version though. Since you already hid the header in the media views, you could just hide the entire header include and it won't show up anywhere. Look for "Topbar" in includes.xml.
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#11
(2016-05-20, 18:52)braz Wrote:
(2016-05-19, 22:28)stueeey Wrote: realise your objective is to remove home menu options, to make it easier for you to maintain... so I'm probably just really bugging you now, sorry braz.... also now realised your planning to remove the ability to 'hide the home screen header' I would also 'really miss' this option, I prefer a minimal uncluttered view... to the point where I actually modded my other movie media views to remove the header bar.

hopefully I'm not bugging you, just trying to point out what I would really miss as a user.

thanks agin.
It's no problem, I appreciate the input. I likely won't be able to meet everyone's needs with this version though. Since you already hid the header in the media views, you could just hide the entire header include and it won't show up anywhere. Look for "Topbar" in includes.xml.

glad my feedback hasn't got your back up braz, appreciate the efforts you go to. I know from previous experience you usually listen to users and stand by your design decisions, if you feel strongly.

As a foot note should you not have had enough of my input Smile ...I have already removed the header bar, can live with the side sub menu, shall miss the combined... but sorry really not a fan of the bloated square widgets, looks very 'Estuary' like... opposite of what I had come to like from mimic, minimalist no fuss approach. personally I can see everything I need to know from just seeing the poster, I don't need a box or text below it further iterating what I can see visually, I view widgets as a quick grasp of whats new etc. Can understand the square grid view for episodes etc, makes perfect sense if implemented here.

sure you shall make the right decisions, you always do Wink ...I am but one user, so please ignore me - lol

thanks again, shall continue to test
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#12
(2016-05-20, 19:18)stueeey Wrote: glad my feedback hasn't got your back up braz, appreciate the efforts you go to. I know from previous experience you usually listen to users and stand by your design decisions, if you feel strongly.

As a foot note should you not have had enough of my input Smile ...I have already removed the header bar, can live with the side sub menu, shall miss the combined... but sorry really not a fan of the bloated square widgets, looks very 'Estuary' like... opposite of what I had come to like from mimic, minimalist no fuss approach. personally I can see everything I need to know from just seeing the poster, I don't need a box or text below it further iterating what I can see visually, I view widgets as a quick grasp of whats new etc. Can understand the square grid view for episodes etc, makes perfect sense if implemented here.

sure you shall make the right decisions, you always do Wink ...I am but one user, so please ignore me - lol

thanks again, shall continue to test
I thought about leaving the basic panel view for widgets. They were a little tricky to position with the varying width/heights of the artwork types though. And it would have been more difficult to create a wider version that would work with the horizontal menu layout. So in the end I decided to remove them. I may try to add them back at some point, but no promises. The combined vertical menu is more likely to make a comeback.
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#13
Moved some of the script.skinshortcuts buttons to a context menu. So if you're editing your menus and don't see all of the options, that's where they are now.

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#14
(2016-05-19, 22:16)stueeey Wrote: am I correct in thinking you have also stripped out the 'combined submenu and main menu' (with the drop downs when using the vertical home menu)?

...if so I am really going to miss that, I found that a great feature. my others users shall not know to press left to find the sub menus, know matter how many times i tell them lol.
Just readded the option to combine the main/submenu into a single list. This requires a fix that will be in the next version of script.skinshortcuts though. And thanks to the skinshortcuts author, I was able to make the widgets visible when the submenu items have the focus.
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#15
Added a subtitle menu to the Video OSD for quicker access (taken from Estuary).

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Mimic 5.x for Krypton2