Public Beta

[jeroenpardon]

So with internal Beta 2 being done as mentioned in #79 it's time to work on getting this out into the world ;)

I expect the road to the public release to be quite short. Basically the focus remains on polishing and on bug fixes that may arise. Other than that it’s cleaning up the code, getting rid of redundant code and textures, things like that.

Any discussion not specific to a reported issue can continue here :)

[jeroenpardon]

It wil not have the category icons as horizontal space is limited in horizontal menus. Longer words need to fit within a relatively small space while also keeping font sizes (and thus readability) into account. Especially because a lot of words tend to use more characters in other languages.

[jeroenpardon]

Hey everybody,

I just pushed a bunch of changes made over the last couple of days. Biggest changes / additions:

• Removed the vertical-stream home menu layout
• Renamed all home menu layouts
• Reshuffled and simplified some skin settings
• Added horizontal home menu layout
• Implemented support for script.colorbox
• Added new skin settings category: visual effects
• Reworked the widget selection dialog
• Some tweaks to widgets and home menu layouts
• Added and updated translations

There's a couple of things to do when updating your install of Grid. These are really important as otherwise you will surely encounter issues. Please take the following steps:

1. Install Grid like you normally do
2. Reset all skin settings (Skin Settings -> General -> Reset skin settings)
3. Reset all home menu item widgets (Skin Settings -> Menus -> Reset all menu items to defaults)
4. Reboot

The following steps are optional as it is an optional feature but I would really like you to try it out and test it.

5. Install the colorbox script: https://github.com/BADMS/script.colorbox If you already have colorbox installed, do this anyway as I am using colorbox features that are not present in the release that is on the Kodi repo. I will put up a colorbox release on my repo shortly as well.
6. Reboot (the skin needs to pick up settings for the colorbox script which are initialized during startup)

After you have installed colorbox you will be able to use two special effects, which you can enable under Skin settings -> Visual effects -> Homescreen

Currently these effects are limited to the new horizontal menu, but I may utilise these in other places too.

When you enable "Blur effect" this will apply a blur to the fanart on the homescreen where the horizontal home menu is located. It will also expand the blur effect when you scroll down from the home menu to the widgets.

Enabling "Fanart colours" works on the same elements as the Blur effect. This effect will change the background colour and text of the home menu to fit the fanart that is currently being displayed.

If you don't enable these features the home menu will use the normal colours.

Contrary to what I said before, the horizontal menu does not offer a choice between a horizontal and vertical submenu. At least not at this point. The vertical submenu looked nice but the navigation just didn't feel right. I may revisit this in the future but I want to focus on the public beta now and not delay myself any further.

There's probably a few rough edges here and there, and I am still tweaking things but it should mostly work correctly.

There's also a lot of changes that aren't visible to you. These are all under the hood type things that either optimize code or make future updated easier. So keep a look out for regressions :)

Cheers!

[jeroenpardon]

Oh, forgot to mention I believe the visual effects above may not work on (certain or all) Android devices due to missing python modules.

[loggio]

Seems to be working well :-) Very polished!!

The effects don't work for me as I'm using an nvidia shield tv (android) so I can't give you my thought on that 'till I have time to test on my other machines.

Although I'm not the biggest fan of the horizontal menu, it's great that the user will have the choice of horizontal and vertical menu types. I'm very picky with that sort of thing and just cannot adapt to the idea of a wrapped horizontally scrolling submenu.

Anyways, you already know my thoughts on this lol.

I'd say this bad boy is ready for public beta! the only outstanding thing is the skin helper fanart for pvr still not working.

[Slurrrp]

Hey @jeroenpardon Very, very nice. Well done man. But only 3 main menu items on screen? ;)

[Ostrymiecz]

Can't wait to test out all new features! Tomorrow I'm going back from summer vacation and I'll see all those new things. So far it sound very good Jeroen! Good job 👍🏻

[jeroenpardon]

@loggio Thanks. Yeah, the PVR stuff will be sorted out. Making up my mind about something often takes way longer than coding it ;)

@Slurrrp Yeah, well that's horizontal menus for ya :) Anything but an odd number will look wrong, so it would be 5 items at least. At 5 items, anything longer than about 6 characters is going to get cut off. So then the seemingly obvious thing to do is decrease font size. Which comes with it's own set of problems.

The only other option I can think of is to use a more condensed font, like I did in reFocus. Already quicky coded it and even though the font itself looks nice, I just don't particularly like the inconsistency that comes with it. Anyway, I might keep that in there or make it an option, not sure.

@Ostrymiecz Hope you had a good vacation, safe travels

[Slurrrp]

@jeroenpardon i understand.. Refocus had 5, right? It was perfect for me. As i use 5 main menu items the most. And navigating was so easy. Now I'm scrolling a bit too much for my liking and loosing the overview. Refocus had 11 characters max? 6 is indeed too little. An extra option with a different font would be great if you're willing to do that. Also, it would be amazing if we can choose the opacity of the menu. :)

[jeroenpardon]

@Slurrrp yeah, reFocus has 5, not sure how many characters it allowed per item. In most cases it's not really an issue as far as the main menu is concerned. But items like recently added movies in sub menus tend to be too long to not get cut off.

Anyway, there is not a "enable condensed menu layout" setting for the horizontal menu. This layout will use the Roboto Condensed font that was used in reFocus and it will display five items.

Screenshot: http://imgur.com/Xaq4QoS.png

If you have some time to test it out, that would be great. I'd like to keep my promise of releasing the public beta this weekend but I'll be gone for most of the day.

About setting opacity of the menu, I will probably add that yes. But it will be after the public beta :)

[Slurrrp]

@jeroenpardon Thanks! This is a lot better. I tested it with the normal font and have 1 main and 1 sub menu item I have to rename. I dont think you really need the other font? (I hate the roboto font, first thing i change on my android phone ;)

One thing i quickly noticed is the unhighlighted text is a lot darker? Bit too dark i'd say. -edit: you lowered the opacity? i like it, but the unhighlighted text (blue) looks weird sometimes. If you can tweak it a bit (not familiar with the script) would be nice.

And i've seen some small bugs, but maybe fix the now playing video on the homescreen before public beta?

[jeroenpardon]

@Slurrrp Cheers. There have been some changes in the script that influence the colours. I'll be tweaking them some more probably. Same goes for the opacity levels. But if it looks really weird you maybe have to clear some the colors.txt file in userdata>addon_data>script.colorbox and reboot.

Will look into the playing video, and by all means let me know of any other bug, big or small :)

edit: oh right, I forgot I changed the window size of the playing video on the homescreen. Not to keep it like this, but I have been thinking about using an optional smaller video window. When it's fullscreen the home menu sitting in front of the subtitles seemed weird.

[Slurrrp]

I think you have to delete the whole folder (thing gets big! reminder: clear it every few months lol) or you get a black menu on items already displayed.

On dark menu's the text is hard to read.. i dont really see the blue text anymore.

Just a big one for me, i'll keep 'bug'ging you about this ;) the visualization is not working and the music art on the home screen is black.. no album or fanart.. the menu shows a blur of the fanart though :)

[jeroenpardon]

The blur and color effects are going into the public beta as a work in progress. I have to tweak the settings of the script some more, but there is not enough time.

A fix for the olaying artist fanart and visualisation has been pushed. Basically the home window now uses the same skin settings as the now playing window.

[jeroenpardon]

@Slurrrp Sorry, I totally forgot to mention you have to update the colorbox script. The version you need is on my repo add-on or you can download it manually here: https://github.com/BADMS/script.colorbox Then throw out the colors.txt file and reboot

[Slurrrp]

I'll do.. So we can install the repo? Do you want us to stick around here after the public beta?

[jeroenpardon]

Beta just went public

@Slurrrp visualizations worked for me last night, I hope I didn't already break it last minute :D If I did, it will be the first known issue for the public beta :)

Yeah, I hope you guys can still stick around for a bit. I'll post more on that here later :)

Oh, and just to be clear. With the PB being available, this of course means you can say or show anything about the skin in public :P

[Slurrrp]

My bad, forgot to enable it after a skin reset, sorry

i do have this now though..https://ibb.co/inPNrk

In a hurry, already late ;) will test more later... good luck with the release!

[Ostrymiecz]

@jeroenpardon In SkinSettings.xml here:

          <control type="button" id="6">
              <include>settings_Menu</include>
              <label>Visual effects</label>
              <onfocus>Skin.SetString(category,visualfx)</onfocus>
              <onright>9600</onright>
          </control>

Label isn't localised.

[Ostrymiecz]

@jeroenpardon Looks like those strings are unused? 31074 31083 31710

And could someone (pretty pretty please) provide me screenshot with english language where strings 31060 and 31062 are used? Those are the words "global" and "other". I don't know how to translate them without developer notes.

Edit: OK. Found string 31060. It was in skin settings. What about 31062?

[Ostrymiecz]

And another thing @jeroenpardon. Just installed your repo 1.0.1 and… Kodi cannot connect to it. That's weird.

Edit: Looks like https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ URL is obsolete?

[jeroenpardon]

@Ostrymiecz 31062 is used in script-cu-lrclyrics-main.xml however, I am not sure for what :D

Considering the label it is set on uses red as a textcolor means it's probably either obsolete or old (I flag items by setting their texcolor to red). I don't really use the script very often, I think this label/string shows up to select a lyric when multiple matches are found or something. It may not even be used in the script anymore. I'll have to look into it. For now I think it's safe to say it's not a very important label.

I'll take care of the unlocalized string. Cheers

[jeroenpardon]

new chapter #98 :)