[djh_]

Thanks for the kind words, folks. Thanks also to the ppl who kept the Aeon name going all these years. It's only because it was still topical around here that I felt this update was worthwhile. And thanks once again to Dan Reid, who's been brilliant getting Colorbox to do a few new but necessary things.

I wasn't entirely sober when I put the OP together, so I'll explain things a little better now. (Though I'm not entirely sober now, either, so, um, yeah.)

The thing I really want to do with this new version is see how much of the 'complete' Kodi experience I can strip away to make Aeon clean and simple. Kodi can feel quite labyrinthine at times, whereas I'd prefer to use something where you never have to think about where you are or what button you have to press. For that reason, Aeon will be a pad/remote-driven living room UI with no dedicated mouse support. I won't rule out adding stuff in later on, but the official line is that it's just the basics, with one view type for any one context.

Material design is very good for Aeon. It means I can make the skin essentially textureless, which for something like the home screen means it can be more invisible than ever before. It means I don't have to use any skeuomorphism or other such graphics for the sake of it, which makes for a purer and smoother design process. And the skin will run at 4K, obviously, without any additional work.

I want the animation in Aeon to be extremely fast, to the point where there's often no animation at all. A mix, then, between instant movement of the browser and very subtle effects for things like panels.

You'll notice there are already certain 'anchors' in place, much like the original Aeon: elements which persist across multiple screens and never change position (though they do now change colour). I'm not going to try and force those things where they don't belong, though, so don't expect to see 'now playing' info on every page. Indeed, I want to really cut down on the more perfunctory elements of modern media centres, especially in terms of meta data. There was a point during the original Aeon where it felt like there couldn't be enough media flags dotted all over the place, but that time has passed. I don't think user ratings are relevant to someone's personal media collection, for example, nor do I think having loads of technical data like aspect ratio and resolution is very 2017. You can forget about weather, too.

As for PVR, I'll look into that after the first release in early-to-mid 2017. I'm totally unfamiliar with that aspect of Kodi, so I'll need to give it proper attention.

Final thing: Aeon will feel really complete this time. It won't be feature-rich compared to other skins, but it will feel like something you can knock about with a pad or remote without weird 'homebrew' things happening. It might end up being that there's a kind of 'management' mode that exposes more options, but I'm not sure that's necessary just yet. I'm happy for there to be a nice big list of 'skin options' if they're justified, but any contextual options during regular use will be kept to a strict minimum.

Next thing I'll probably show is the playback controls, which again are very minimal. They're more Netflix than regular Kodi, so no playback buttons at all.