[LeeG]

Nice,

Quick question tho, whilst watching full-screen TV and using INFO to bring up the programme information, pushing UP now tries to Seek +10 instead of showing what's on next. This was happening with the last couple of releases too. Just wondering if this is happening for anyone else or if this is just an issue my end I'm gonna have to track down?

[im85288]

Strange, no problems from my testing..if others report it I will look into it..though I cannot imagine why its doing that. Added a few more tile colours so each section can have a different colour now that pictures are included.

[LeeG]

k m8, no probs. Gonna check what's different at my end.

[fantasticn]

Hi im85288,

Once again thank you for your hard work and for providing us with such an amazing skin. I especially like the new views of the artic skin. However, I cannot really get used to the colors. It is definitly to bright for my taste. My Plasma-TV even makes loud noises because of the strong brightness and the white background. Unfortunately there is no option anymore to select a darker tone. Same applies to the fonts which are a little bit to narrow for me.

Is there a chance that you can implement an option to get back to an (significantly) darker theme?

Brgds,

FantasticN

[im85288]

Hi FantasticN,

Did you try selecting the show more fanart option at the bottom of the general settings? That makes it darker on my screen. Other than that you can try setting a dark background in the backgrounds section of settings, but maybe further down the line some different themes may be added as it's not something I have attempted yet!

[fantasticn]

Yes, you are right. After selecting a darker background image and turning on the "show more fanart"-option it gets bettet. But still it is a very bright mod and still the transition turns the lower half of the screen almost into white.

[BigPoppa17211]

Love the new combo mod! Getting the overlapping clearart and logo on the pause screen again though. Also, really liked the info list view from before, any way to include that back in?

[im85288]

Thanks for the report guys, the overlapping clearart should hopefully be fixed now and the show more fanart option now removes the lower white section of the screen. With regards adding back the info list view, yes that should not take too long to integrate. Also further updates to PVR screens to fit into the new look and the quick nav panel has also been updated.

[im85288]

Added Info List View - available on Github





Same view with show more fanart:

[fantasticn]

Thanks for the report guys, the overlapping clearart should hopefully be fixed now and the show more fanart option now removes the lower white section of the screen.

First of all: Thanx for delivering such a quick support. You are really doing a fantastic job!

Now, as to the "show more fanart"-option I think you overstepped the mark. Right now there is no transition at all. The background is totally shining through. If you have fanarts the screen seems to be overloaded with colors and you even cannot read infos. I really liked the decent colors and transition of the background of your old mod. Can't you just step back to that kind of color-system? And as to the new fonts: they are quiet narrow, but also bold. So they are slightly harder to read, especially from a distance. Is there a chance to at least implement the option to use the fonts of the old mod again or maybe Arial? I remember most skins offering such selection under settings / appearance / theme / fonts.

Brgds,

FantasticN

[im85288]

Hi Fantasticn, I know what you mean about it being hard to read so I just updated it with white font throughout the headers and footers, hopefully this helps a bit. Other than that I may add a middle ground again, but want to avoid the problems with views I had in the last skin when showing different levels of background. As to the fonts, I'll keep it in mind if I start adding themes to the skin.

edit - added more levels of background, now has four altogether. The default, a one to show even less, one to show more and one to show even more. Plus renamed the settings to "show more background" rather than "show more fanart" etc - available on Github

[bandelguy]

@im85288:- in the any of the music views, record labels don't show up. please fix that.

any chance of supporting Weather underground extended features ?

[fantasticn]

Hi Fantasticn, I know what you mean about it being hard to read so I just updated it with white font throughout the headers and footers, hopefully this helps a bit. Other than that I may add a middle ground again, but want to avoid the problems with views I had in the last skin when showing different levels of background. As to the fonts, I'll keep it in mind if I start adding themes to the skin.

edit - added more levels of background, now has four altogether. The default, a one to show even less, one to show more and one to show even more. Plus renamed the settings to "show more background" rather than "show more fanart" etc - available on Github

Wow, you are really fast!

As to the transition: You now implemented the option: "show more fanart", which - if activated - gives you the additional option to "show even more background". And there is another option "show less fanart". Since activating the latter only deactivates the first one and the otherway round, I would assume that we actually do not need the latter one. So when I tried the combination of those switches I also just counted three different states of transition:

1. "show less fanart" activated (which leads to "show more fanart" deactivated) and therefore no "show even more fanart" option:
This is the place we started from. Very bright background. Fanart almost not recognizable. My Plasma-TV is making loud noises because of the strong brightness of the screen. This is definitly too bright for my taste.

2. "show more fanart" activated (which leads to "show less fanart" deactivated) and "show even mor fanart" activated:
This is the state you implemented in your previsous version. Now all backgrounds an fanarts are fully shing through. The screen becomes very colorful and optically overloaded. The greyish fonts on informations-screens are not readable anymore. This is much to "agressive" und very useful in my opinion.

3. "show more fanart" activated (which leads to "show less fanart" deactivated) and "show even more fanart" deactivated:
This is the "medium stage" that you also tried out in a previous version. It completely shows the background on the top of the screen and fades into fully white to the bottom of the screen. Currently to me it is definitly the best of all three options that you offer. However, it could still be slightly darker (more fading into grey than white). I defenitly prefered the background as it was in your other mod (Xperience1080++) with the "show mor fanart"-option enabled, where the most transition was in the middle of the screen and it faded out to the top and to the bottom into a medium grey tone. The intensity and lightness of that screen was more harmonious.

Still there is another issue with the fonts. As I already stated they are very norrow and bold even though. That makes them significantly harder to read from a distance. Even the menu items are harder to recognize. I also do not find them "stylish". To me the fonts seem a litte bit "sappy" (is that the word to use - I do not know). An option to select standard fonts would really be nice.

But once again: Thanks for your hard work and for trying to comply with our suggestions and "criticism". You are really doing a great job! Maybe we gonna see the "perfect skin" for XBMC afterwards :-)

Brgds,

FantasticN

[im85288]

Good Morning FantasticN,

I think you may have been trying a version that was not quite ready..the options should be saying "show less background", "show more background" and "show even more background"...can you try again from Github as it seems you had a buggy version!

As for the fonts, I did notice yesterday that it was perhaps difficult to read..the bad news is changing it all can be a huge job so I may try changing the home screen to see how it looks.

@bandelguy - that's not something I noticed, I will take a look when time allows, can you tell me what the extra features are that weather underground supports that you would like to use? It is not an api I am familiar with.

[fantasticn]

Good Morning FantasticN,

I think you may have been trying a version that was not quite ready..the options should be saying "show less background", "show more background" and "show even more background"...can you try again from Github as it seems you had a buggy version!

As for the fonts, I did notice yesterday that it was perhaps difficult to read..the bad news is changing it all can be a huge job so I may try changing the home screen to see how it looks.

@bandelguy - that's not something I noticed, I will take a look when time allows

Good morning im58288,

sorry, you are absolutely right: In the options-dialoge it is called "background" not "fanart" (so it actually says "show more background", "show even more background" and "show less background"). I was already using your latest version and just mixed up the terms when typing my post, cause I was not sitting in front of my OpenElec machines then. However, the results are as discribed: It is just three different states of transition you can get from the combinations of those options whereas "show less background" is much too bright (for my taste) and "show even more background" is too striking colorful and fonts are unreadable. So selecting just "show more background" is currently the best option in my eyes. Anyways, I very much prefered the look of your other mod "Xperience1080++" if it comes to transition, background/fanarts and colors.

Continuously looking at an all too bright screen hurts the eyes, whereas too much "fanart" and "colors" seems childish und not elegant enough. I would not actually recommend using just black colors (since this might be too boring as well), but the transition could fade more into some kind of light or medium grey than into that all too bright white.

As to the fonts: I don't want to nag you. If it is too hard work to implement than of course I understand. However, isn't there just a way to "revert" those kind of things and take them from your old mod "Xperience1080++"? Since this gonna be a mixured of both Arctic-mod and Xperience1080++ anyway you just might select which elements to take from what side.

Brgds,

FantasticN