[bsoriano]

 

@Tiny Clanger , thanks for your feedback.

In terms of these new requests:

1. I have added on GitHub the end time to the shelves.  It looks like this:




2. I will not be able to do anything in regards to long album names flowing over to the next line when using square for albums.  Unfortunately, I do not know ahead of time what the length of the label is going to be.  I could use an even smaller font, but I think it would be very difficult to see from a distance.

3.  I have widened the left item shelf label as much as I can, taking into account that there needs to be room for the shelf label itself, which is shown at the far right.  With a very long album name from my collection it looks like this:



Or like this with a slightly shorter one:



@Tiny Clanger , these changes are on GitHub already.

Please let me know if this is what you were looking for.  Thanks.


Regards,

Bart

Thanks, Bart.

I've quit Kodi, pulled the latest version of Amber, and restarted Kodi — but while I'm now seeing the end times on the shelves, they're getting truncated quite early. Did you increase the left shelf label on the movie and TV shelves, or just on the music one? (It does appear to be wider in music…)



I guess I'd hoped Kodi would let you assign the split as "take as much space as the right label needs, then use the rest for the left label", thus allowing me to give the right label a short name and claim the rest of the space — but it sounds like you have to decide the percentage split ahead of time when coding the skin?

I don't really know much about Kodi skinning, and can't find the relevant bit of XML, but for the square view's labels, I'm guessing you're passing a string with the album title, a line break, and the artist name, and letting Kodi handle the wrapping on a two-line high label. Would having two single-line labels with a maximum width be possible instead, perhaps? (That said, there might be views where splitting the label up and losing auto-wrap doesn't make sense…)

I found why the labels are pushed down off the bottom of the box, as in the screenshot below — if the window's aspect ratio is not 16:9, the centring goes wrong. That could be a problem for people using windowed mode, as they'd need to be precise in their window sizing — or for people using 16:10 monitors to watch on their computers, rather than using TVs (insert grumble about monitor manufacturers ditching 16:9 here 😁)


I don't know if it's possible to handle different aspect ratios without a lot of manual workarounds, though, so this might not be particularly fixable.

Thanks for all your help!

@Tiny Clanger , thanks for the additional feedback.  I did widen the label for all widgets, not just for music.  So perhaps the update was not completed correctly for some reason? Could you please try this direct zip file for the skin? https://github.com/bartolomesoriano/skin...master.zip  You can "install from zip file" from within Kodi and this should update the skin.  To ensure that no new changes for widgets are missing, you can also delete the "script-skinshortcuts-includes.xml" file from the skin's 1080i folder.  This will be re-built automatically and you will not lose any of the configurations you have done.  To be super cautious, do these steps:

1. Update the skin by "installing from zip" from the link I provided above
2. You might see a blank screen while the skin updates for a moment.  This is normal.
3. After the skin has updated, quit Kodi.
4. Delete the "script-skinshortcuts-includes.xml" file
5. Restart Kodi

Your menu should be rebuilt then.

And unfortunately, the skinning engine does not allow me (or I do not know how to do it) to dynamically split the width between the two labels.  I have to specify ahead of time the width of each one.

As for the aspect ratio, yes, it is a big hassle to code for different aspect ratios, so I will not be taking that on.  

In terms of the labels for the albums in square view, you are correct about a single label that has two parts separated by a line break.  I do not think having two separate labels would make much difference since the available width will not change.  I will not be making that change.

Regards,

Bart