[smitchell6879]

How many of you skinners start working on a skin and midway realize it is crap or just not where you want to go and start over? Reason I am asking I am four months in and just feel like I am running through roll and have lost what I really wanted to accomplish. just wondering if this is part of the process? hahaha

Look forward to your experiences.

[Hitcher]

After the original Alaska was released I wasn't happy with it and made Alaska Revisited; again I wasn't happy and released the final Alaska.

[smitchell6879]

So I am not going completely crazy then. hahha

[Jeroen]

How many of you skinners start working on a skin and midway realize it is crap or just not where you want to go and start over? Reason I am asking I am four months in and just feel like I am running through roll and have lost what I really wanted to accomplish. just wondering if this is part of the process? hahaha

Look forward to your experiences.

Many times. Maybe not necessarily always start over the entire skin, but I have recoded and / or redesigned many parts multiple times, often before it was even added to any public release. It's not even specifically related to Kodi or skinning. I consider myself a creative and highly critical person, and it is part of any creative process I go through.

Don't look at it in a negative way though, if you manage to control it, it is a learning process and it will result in something better than you originally envisioned.

[jurialmunkey]

Oh yes, many many times. Its very easy to lose the focus of your original vision. Features and extras start creeping in and suddenly you find the skin has lost its original simplicity that provided its identity. Or, on the other hand, you realise that your original vision didn't account for some other use cases (everything worked great when it was just movies, and then I moved onto other parts and not so much.....) -- I agree with Jeroen though, it's all a learning process and you really do end up with something better at the end of it all.

Arctic has gone through 3 iterations, pretty much the same can be said of Eminence. Both have had complete rewrites from scratch.

Arctic was my first skin, which was originally a mod to give xperience1080 an Alaska spin. As I learned about skinning, my mod slowly morphed and evolved into its own skin. As my skinning skills improved I found myself more and more constrained by things that were in the skin - there were so many things that I hated about the skin or I felt were ugly or inconsistent, but I couldn't just remove them without annoying a bunch of users. Really the only option was to just let it go and do a complete redesign and rewrite from scratch. Arctic Zephyr is pretty different from the early versions, but starting from scratch really freed up my creativity a lot - and lots of people seem to like it, so it seems like it paid off.

Same thing with Eminence. It just started off as a bit of fun trying to make a homescreen along the lines of the LG webOS and then it just morphed into its own thing, but it got to a point where I was getting really annoyed with a number of inconsistencies in the skin because it had evolved naturally. Started over (not as dramatic as Arctic though) and made Eminence 2. I think I polarised opinions a bit with some choices I made. Ended up rewriting a bunch of things again, taking on board some of the criticisms - now its finally at a point where I'm pretty happy with it, its a solid dependable skin that I use as my daily driver.

[smitchell6879]

Jeroen, thanks and I try to look at the positive I know it will make it better end but the negatives are very easy to find haha.

And jurialmunkey I am glad to hear that others have done a almost completely rewrite, I see now that this is just part of the development haha.

Thank you guys for letting me know this is normal part, I guess I will give it a little break and give it yet another go around.