2023-06-23, 23:37
Dear all,
As you might know, a lot of work has been done recently to improve the native windowing version of Kodi up to a point where we are considering the switch (and ditch the old SDL implementation).
This work was done as an effort to attain feature parity with the SDL counterpart and unify the x86 and arm64 macOS Kodi releases. By now, the native windowing implementation is far superior to SDL: it supports retina displays (HiDPI), has improved window move and resize operations, app menu, and just feels more natural for regular macOS users. Hopefully it will make it easier to add new features to the platform while ditching one unmaintained dependency.
Background:
When XBMC started to be ported to Linux ages ago, SDL was chosen as the input and windowing toolkit to bring the application to the platform. Other ports, like OSX, also "inherited" the implementation. With time and the work to split/segregate platform code, SDL started to be removed in favour of specific platform implementations. At this point, only macOS still uses SDL.
The work on native windowing has started a few years ago in a feature branch (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/tree/osxremovesdl) by @Memphiz , @Rechi and others. With the release of recent macs with apple silicon and the difficults to compile Kodi for arm64 (or update SDL), @Fuzzard has made further improvements to the system and merged it into master as an option (used by default for arm).
This now got to a point where it'd be nice to have users (and team) feedback to consider the change for Omega Alpha3
Thanks to everyone who has worked somehow to make this possible!
Testbuilds:
MacOS x86: https://mirrors.kodi.tv/test-builds/osx/...x86_64.dmg
MacOS arm64: https://mirrors.kodi.tv/test-builds/osx/...-arm64.dmg
What we need from you:
Feedback is appreciated if you are a Kodi user on macOS. Essentially window operations, OS shortcuts, fullscreen, move the window between screens, resize, window buttons - resize, minimize, exit -, input, window menu, dock menu, etc.
It should be "identical" to previous versions but better. If not, something is wrong
As you might know, a lot of work has been done recently to improve the native windowing version of Kodi up to a point where we are considering the switch (and ditch the old SDL implementation).
This work was done as an effort to attain feature parity with the SDL counterpart and unify the x86 and arm64 macOS Kodi releases. By now, the native windowing implementation is far superior to SDL: it supports retina displays (HiDPI), has improved window move and resize operations, app menu, and just feels more natural for regular macOS users. Hopefully it will make it easier to add new features to the platform while ditching one unmaintained dependency.
Background:
When XBMC started to be ported to Linux ages ago, SDL was chosen as the input and windowing toolkit to bring the application to the platform. Other ports, like OSX, also "inherited" the implementation. With time and the work to split/segregate platform code, SDL started to be removed in favour of specific platform implementations. At this point, only macOS still uses SDL.
The work on native windowing has started a few years ago in a feature branch (https://github.com/xbmc/xbmc/tree/osxremovesdl) by @Memphiz , @Rechi and others. With the release of recent macs with apple silicon and the difficults to compile Kodi for arm64 (or update SDL), @Fuzzard has made further improvements to the system and merged it into master as an option (used by default for arm).
This now got to a point where it'd be nice to have users (and team) feedback to consider the change for Omega Alpha3
Thanks to everyone who has worked somehow to make this possible!
Testbuilds:
MacOS x86: https://mirrors.kodi.tv/test-builds/osx/...x86_64.dmg
MacOS arm64: https://mirrors.kodi.tv/test-builds/osx/...-arm64.dmg
What we need from you:
Feedback is appreciated if you are a Kodi user on macOS. Essentially window operations, OS shortcuts, fullscreen, move the window between screens, resize, window buttons - resize, minimize, exit -, input, window menu, dock menu, etc.
It should be "identical" to previous versions but better. If not, something is wrong
