Maraschino (formerly HTPC Frontend) - a summary web interface for your XBMC HTPC

Would be nice also to have a button to call the subtitle option when you watch a movie/tv show. What do you think?

Hi Guys!

Well some of you guys may remember me from the old Media Front Page days. I have been relying on MFP for a long time, it has been indispensable to me. Once the final release of Eden was out, I thought I needed to jump on the band wagon. I have 2 XBMC machines on my network, running XBMC Live - and now XBMCbuntu. All my media is stored on an unRAID server. So naturally, MFP does not work well Eden. So I came to find out about Maraschino.

I have to congratulate and thank MrKipling, Gugahoi, DejaVu, Nemesis (sorry for the nickname typo - minor dyslexia) and all others for their outstanding work.

In no time I was up and running Maraschino, and I am not a Linux guy. I know enough to do what I need to do (after a lot of Googling) and have to re-learn again when months pass without me needing to do anything. I am a designer by profession, and can muddle very slightly in basic html, Understanding CSS is a struggle to me.

As a designer, I always want to tweak things so they work better for me. MFP was one of those projects. With Maraschino, everything is pretty great. I do have some suggestions. Unfortunately, some of these are not so easy for me to implement.

A) Create the option of having a 4 column version. I was able to edit the columns.less file to create the following. I just don't know how to implement being able to add modules to this column. This is in anticipation of the RSS Feed Module.



B) Minor Suggestion. Adding little icons to each of the module headers. I mocked up this in Photoshop. I have no clue how to implement this with my skill set.

C) On the Sickbeard Module. When looking at the upcoming episodes screen (as shown on my attached image), for each show banner, have the blue episode name and the 3 icon ONLY appear when hovering the cursor over the Show banner. Otherwise interface looks cluttered.

D) With the ability of having multiple XBMC servers, is there a way to quickly and easily identify which server you are on while looking at the screen? I would suggest a small text label at the top of the screen. This same label could be used to toggle to the other servers.

E) After a Couch Potato module (which lists your Wanted Movies); create a new module with a button that transfers $1 million dollars to my bank account. Something similar to what they did in the movie Office Space, except make it 100% legal.

Question:
On the Disk Space module, I want to add disks that are in my unRAID server. Maraschino is installed on my XBMCbuntu machines. I have tried the following and none work:

root@192.168.0.201:/mnt/disk1
smb://192.168.0.201:/mnt/disk1
192.168.0.201:/mnt/disk1

Any ideas?

Guys, thanks again, and please let me know if there is anything I can help with.

With Maraschino, life is a bowl of cherries.

Hernando

Mount the shares on the xbmcbuntu machine then give diskspace module the path. For example I have my movies on unraid and mounted to /media/movies on xbmcbuntu. Just google mounting smb shares if your not sure how.

(2012-04-16 11:46)Gotcha007 Wrote:  Would be nice also to have a button to call the subtitle option when you watch a movie/tv show. What do you think?

Just my opinion but I think this is something best left to your remote. If you're watching the show just map a button to toggle subtitles on/off. The keyboard shortcut 'T' will do this for you on a keyboard.

(2012-04-18 16:43)hernandito Wrote:  B) Minor Suggestion. Adding little icons to each of the module headers. I mocked up this in Photoshop. I have no clue how to implement this with my skill set.

I thought this idea would be pretty neat as long as it doesn't take away from the slick look Maraschino already has. I did notice looking through the folders that there is an images/applications folder with a lot of icons for sickbeard, xbmc, trakt, etc in it. Was this something that was in the works already?

(2012-04-18 22:01)N3MIS15 Wrote:  Mount the shares on the xbmcbuntu machine then give diskspace module the path. For example I have my movies on unraid and mounted to /media/movies on xbmcbuntu. Just google mounting smb shares if your not sure how.

Thank you...it worked perfectly. It gives me the entire storage available in unRAID server.

Are you running Maraschino on your XBMC client machine, or in the unRAID server itself? I tried running it in unRAID but could not manage to get it to recognize my XBMC clients

Thanks again!

H.

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(2012-04-18 22:21)robweber Wrote:  

(2012-04-18 16:43)hernandito Wrote:  B) Minor Suggestion. Adding little icons to each of the module headers. I mocked up this in Photoshop. I have no clue how to implement this with my skill set.

I thought this idea would be pretty neat as long as it doesn't take away from the slick look Maraschino already has. I did notice looking through the folders that there is an images/applications folder with a lot of icons for sickbeard, xbmc, trakt, etc in it. Was this something that was in the works already?

I am kind of on the fence on this one. Before anyone goes crazy implementing this, can people please chime in with their thoughts... with "Like Icons" or "No Icons"

(2012-04-18 16:43)hernandito Wrote:  I am kind of on the fence on this one. Before anyone goes crazy implementing this, can people please chime in with their thoughts... with "Like Icons" or "No Icons"

Optional "Icons" or "No Icons" in the settings panel?
I like the idea, but I think the icons should be Maraschino-fied.
IMO, they should be greyscaled to fit the style.

Just my IMO.

I also agree with an option for 4 columns, I did try once, but it went wrong. I could add to the fourth column, but the module didnt stay in it. I gave up after a while.

Also, just a heads up - although seems to be working for you - Maraschino is designed and works best from Google Chrome. Those scrollbars look ugly!
Internet Explorer is for kids.

Would it be possible to create a sort of pull-down menu function?

For example, my application list is so huge that some add-on's are out of sight/screen. Creating a pull-down function for it would be great.
I would like to compact some add-on's so i got the most important stuff on my screen en can pull down the ones i need.

(2012-04-19 01:06)schumi2004 Wrote:  Would it be possible to create a sort of pull-down menu function?

For example, my application list is so huge that some add-on's are out of sight/screen. Creating a pull-down function for it would be great.
I would like to compact some add-on's so i got the most important stuff on my screen en can pull down the ones i need.

At the risk of sounding sacrilegious, I have created a work around. Back in the old MFP days, I created a frames html page where a top html housed a list of shortcuts that all opened on larger window below. I could toggle back and forth between all the apps and the Maraschino screen.



Not elegant, but for the time being, it does the job nicely. I could envision doing these links all as little pull down thingys like the "Settings" button on top left and the other mini menu on top right. These should definitely have mini gey-scale icons to keep the look nice, clean and minimal.

I have to change the old MFP logo (which I designed... )

Something like the mockup I just made would be great....



Please know that I do not have the skills to do this... all I can do is come up with the idea.

(2012-04-19 05:17)hernandito Wrote:  Something like the mockup I just made would be great....



Please know that I do not have the skills to do this... all I can do is come up with the idea.

Yeah, something like that. I don't have the skills myself also but maybe others will jump into this.