Skin & UI Suggestions for Frodo

pecinko Wrote:Ability to define minimal XBMC version by skin:
There are many posts by users installing skin for nightly builds on stable release and running into all kinds of problem. It is not obvious if skin problems are related to this and users do not offer enough info for troubleshooting.

If skin could specify minimal XBMC version requirement which will prevent add-on install on unsupported XBMC builds, this situation could be avoided.

Discussed this a while ago here, not sure what's happened since though.

Hitcher Wrote:I tried using <minversion app="xbmc">177d3cb</minversion> in my addon.xml because that's the how the nightly is labelled (xbmc-r177d3cb-master.exe) and that's also the build found in the system info but when I tested this using Dharma the skin still updated.

What's the correct method now?

Thanks.

jmarshall Wrote:Neither. The tag is completely useless, and really should not be there at all.

Instead, we should be bumping the API version when things are added. I haven't as yet as we haven't agreed on how this should be done during the "things are in flux and might change quite a bit" phase of development.

I'll see if I can start a discussion about this and come up with some guidelines.

Cheers,
Jonathan

jmarshall Wrote:Ok, had a quick chat with Cory - I think the plan for now is:

1. Check the versioning stuff does what it should do.
2. Bump the version and ensure that the user is informed as to why they can't load/install the skin (The dependency check is currently done after load unfortunately).
3. Look at when we should bump versions. This will probably become apparent after a while.

Other things to help is that we'll be looking at getting the buildbot to build my branch (or perhaps master + guilib branch merged) as I need it so that you guys can test out new code before it gets in - that way we should hopefully get more places where the feature goes in complete with version bump.

Unfortunately I suspect the version checks aren't done at all in Dharma, so it probably won't help with users attempting to install your skin there - never know though, we might be lucky!

Cheers,
Jonathan

Access to ListItem.Property(SeasonThumb) outside of DialogVideoInfo

Total number of songs and albums
Ticket

Font outlines
I still would really like to see this one
Ticket

<overlaytexture> tag for image control

This should behave exactly the same as <bordertexture> but should be rendered on top of an image instead.

Container type fixedpanel

Panel container with ability to fix row/column as in fixedlist container.

<overlaytexture> is unlikely to be added unless there is an extreme need for it. You already have a diffuse + border, do you really need something else? Prove it.

pecinko Wrote:ListItem.Description to rule them all:
Idea is to aggregate all plots, show plots and similar into one - Item description. For compatibility sake old ones can stay in place, but considered obsolete.

Does this mean there would no longer be a PlotOutline and a Plot as separate entities?? I hope not, as I've used the PlotOutline as a comment filed for all my movies, which allows me to add notes to movies (things like subtitle streams etc)

I could live with it if a "Comment" field was added though.

No that should only merge ListItem.Plot, ListItem.ShowPlot, ListItem.Property(Album_Description) and ListItem.Property(Artist_Description) to ListItem.Description because it's all basically the same and if I'm not wrong there's never a place where 2 of those info labels appear.

Support for multiimage controls that update correctly for use in DialogSeekBar &/or VideoFullScreen - meaning you can have quite informative pause screens with (say updated weather radar pics etc., and/or other informational graphical elements...

(currently the images in the path are updated only on initial skin load)

KidKiwi Wrote:Does this mean there would no longer be a PlotOutline and a Plot as separate entities?? I hope not, as I've used the PlotOutline as a comment filed for all my movies, which allows me to add notes to movies (things like subtitle streams etc)

That's interesting way of using PlotOutline

No, as Black said, those are not affected.

jmarshall Wrote:<overlaytexture> is unlikely to be added unless there is an extreme need for it. You already have a diffuse + border, do you really need something else? Prove it.

When using light effects on image (glass, shading) you mostly need them on top of Thumb. Diffuse and BorderTexture are of no use here, if I'm not mistaken.

Currently the only way is using an extra image and placing it in code in such a way that it will render after Thumb. This is problematic to do with aspectratio=keep images.

Bordertexture would be perfect, if you could alter Z order, making it to render above Thumb:

<bordertexture alignZ="top">GlassOverlay.png</bordertexture>
<bordersize>0</bordersize>

with alignZ that defaults to "bottom" (current border texture behavior)

Makes sense?