[Skin] Rapier Clarity Mod (3.5.49)

xbs · Post by **xbs** » Wed Feb 13, 2013 2:39 pm

Is that play button always visible?
You can hide it when drive is empty.

byron · Post by **byron** » Sun Feb 17, 2013 6:16 am

- New Feature (customizable icons and top menu bar) -

@ xbs...sorry to take so long to get back to you, I've been figuring some stuff out as far as customization goes. The problem wasn't hiding the play button conditionally, it was that there wasn't a play button (just an "open tray" button that I was wanting to turn into a play button). I see no reason why it should be necessary to hide what I've done (which was replace the eject with play), I simply didn't understand why there was an open tray button there in the first place. Thanks for the suggestion though, I appreciate any help from you! Thinking back to the PM's between us before I released this, I actually figured out a way to make the icons customizable without the need to change the theme (a good start to complete customization of the Breadcrumb for now )

skin settings/Top Bar (choose which one you want):

there are 3 colors (I personally like vanilla, didn't think it was fair to press my opinion so "gray" is default):

: DEFAULT.png (4.63 KiB) Viewed 5512 times

: VANILLA.png (4.61 KiB) Viewed 5512 times

: WHITE.png (5.07 KiB) Viewed 5512 times

So I completely remade all of the TopBar icons and made them customizable (was a big goal of mine from the onset, but the skinning engine only lets you get away with what xbmc will let the skinning engine get away with

). It might not seem like much of an improvement, but I can promise you that it took quite a bit of thought and patience to make this work. I originally wanted to make the entire Breadcrumb area customizable between 4 colors before I released the skin, but realized that I didn't understand exactly how to do that (instead released it with set colors that I pretty much settled for). I won't promise complete customization, but this is a good start in that direction...

If you update this from the 720p + extras, all you need to do is replace the 720p folder and take the textures.xpr file from "extras," place it into Rapier Clarity Mod/media and replace the textures.xpr file that's in there. To any of you out there that are using this skin, you're gonna dig how much cleaner and (imo) "un-noticeable" the icons are once you update it...enjoy

** EDIT **
I just got finished testing the new stable release 3.2.1 (B4K3D PI's link), and all of the work that I did with the home menu add-on shortcuts now have gratification thanks to BuZz adding a4x to the trunk...if you use this skin it just got even easier! I've been messing with stuff for a couple of hours, seems as though this is a definite upgrade as far as I'm concerned

byron · Post by **byron** » Mon Feb 18, 2013 10:13 am

updated again...found that several dialogs weren't displaying certain labels with the new stable, resolved the issue. If you just updated sorry, but it probably should be redone

byron · Post by **byron** » Tue Feb 19, 2013 10:40 am

I finally got around to making the thumbs visible next to the ListView labels

byron · Post by **byron** » Sat Feb 23, 2013 9:19 am

Okay, I finally got the Breadcrumb area in line and customizable without having to change the theme...colors aren't maybe to your liking but I'm willing to add more or change slightly what is there so feedback is more than welcome. What a mind-f*** to get that in order (months of trial and error for a few stupid independent color changes)

I still have a few things to work out, but it's ready to use for sure.

@ xbs and dom (can"t think of any other skinners here but maybe you guys wanna know)...I'll explain how I accomplished this if you two are interested. It wasn't easy, but it's understandable and not too hard to do once you wrap your mind around it ---

skatulskijean · Post by **skatulskijean** » Sat Feb 23, 2013 10:01 am

Hi !

have a look on the boxee insperat skin thread i have added the download link (rss feeds since full workin)!
When you have interess you find the solution to add a rss feed or more feeds (video) to yor homescreen on the First Post on the boxee insperat skin Thread!

Regards Jan

whufclee · Post by **whufclee** » Sat Feb 23, 2013 6:38 pm

byron, forgot to tell you... A mate came over with his xbox wanting an upgrade so I though that's the ideal time for me to try out your skin (not switched an xbox on in a while). Brilliant, I love it - nice and simple and easy to read. Well done mate, I set it up as his default skin and didn't tell him how to change it back! There was one thing I noticed it doesn't have, or at least I couldn't find it in the few minutes I played with it... an exit button. I know I can press the thumbsick in to bring up the power menu but if I'm using the remote that's not an option. I use exit quite a lot as it loads up unleashx on exit which is handy for ftp'ing. Other than that though, brilliant work.

byron · Post by **byron** » Sun Feb 24, 2013 1:49 pm

@ whufclee...I'm glad you finally gave it a go, and it's nice to see anyone that's been involved in this for as long as you say such nice things

much appreciated! Still many things left to iron out, but this project has come a long way...use it or not, it's turning into a really decent skin. As far as the exit button...all you have to do is click on the power icon in the corner and it opens up the Shutdown menu. When you exit xbmc though, it goes to the xbox menu and not unleashx. I'm not sure why, but I'll have to look into the built in functions and see if there's a better command than "<onclick>quit ()</onclick>" to exit the program to unleash. Either way, that's how you shut it down without having a game-pad.

I've also updated a couple of things:

--> added conditional weather option to the homescreen weather menu (must be enabled in skin settings under "WEATHER")
--> fixed a couple of bugs with the shutdown menu (the box now extends with the log in/master user buttons if that makes sense)

If anyone is interested, I made a link on the OP for a conditional weather zip that I found over on the xbmc.org forums. I didn't want to just include it the skin (optional is better I think because it would add another 30mb on to the download). The images are more accurate for the conditions as far as I can tell, and I personally like the pictures better. Anyway, if you like the conditional weather option do yourself a favor and install that folder because it's actually a really cool feature to have in any skin (install path on the read me).

xbs · Post by **xbs** » Sun Feb 24, 2013 5:54 pm

User needs to set costume dash path in programs settings for exit.

byron · Post by **byron** » Sat Mar 02, 2013 12:28 pm

Yet another suite of dialogs finished (I'll spare most of the images)

if you actually use the skin...enjoy this (I think you will really like what I've done with profiles settings!)

Conditional weather added to home screen

Have you tried this skin yet? You should...

byron · Post by **byron** » Sun Mar 03, 2013 8:28 pm

Continued from different thread...

neohasse wrote:
byron wrote:@ neohasse...viewtopic.php?f=14&t=993&p=9139#p9139

actually trying out your skin atm.
the feeling and the flow of it is great, only thing is for some reason it replaced all my season posters of my series with the banner of the show.. annoying.

Thanks for trying it, I'm not sure what's going on with that issue (I just added this show into my library and it seems to work fine):

These are from two different views showing the seasons container (can't use posters for anything other than seasons in "TV Shows" AFAIK). I'm more than happy to help if I can...thanks again for trying the skin ---

BTW, did you try using ToDDS ( I'm curious if it helped resolve your memory issue)?

neohasse · Post by **neohasse** » Sun Mar 03, 2013 10:54 pm

I know, all worked fine until I started updating the library. At the same time I was fiddling with the skin settings and enabled "Kino" just to see what is was, I still have no idea what it does. Then I started an episode, pressed the blue button to see the status of the update then noticed that instead of the season poster there was the tv show banner. Got annoyed and disabled the "Kino", got back to the TV Show section and then I realized that somehow every season poster of every show I have was like that. Whatever I did after that I couldnt get it back, and manually changing every season poster in xbmc is not something I wanna do.
I have no log of this, just the procedure.
I'm currently editing every show I have with MC, just in case this happens again.

Another thing I noticed straight away was that after changing TO this skin and then press select to get out of the menu, the screen get black.

byron · Post by **byron** » Sun Mar 03, 2013 11:38 pm

neohasse wrote:...At the same time I was fiddling with the skin settings and enabled "Kino" just to see what is was, I still have no idea what it does.

I'm not sure, but if you're using kino.de it's a German movie scraper I think (kino.to is the video addon?). Either way, I'm almost positive that it's an add-on made with the German language in mind. As far as the screen black out on skin changing goes, it's a minor nuisance at most. If you hit the back button once on the home screen, it's easily resolved. Having said that, I've never been able to figure out how to remedy that little issue. Maybe I'll have another look into tonight since I have the day off tomorrow

BTW, I've always just restarted xbmc after changing skins anyway because it seems that no matter what skin you're changing to or coming from it always seems to get pretty buggy after that switch is made.

If you keep using this skin, any feedback is more than welcome and appreciated...thanks again for giving it a go.

neohasse · Post by **neohasse** » Mon Mar 04, 2013 3:56 am

Liked both, Confluence Lite and this one, but for now I'm going to stick with this, cuz its apparently getting updates.

I've now spent hours with MC to generate .nfo's to my shows, got stuck on how to solve multipart episodes. I'm not going to give up yet!
THEN I will go fiddle around more with the skin, gonna come back with feedback after that, I know that I had some thoughts before, but now all I see is .nfo's.

byron · Post by **byron** » Mon Mar 04, 2013 6:04 am

byron wrote:As far as the screen black out on skin changing goes, it's a minor nuisance at most. If you hit the back button once on the home screen, it's easily resolved. Having said that, I've never been able to figure out how to remedy that little issue...

I spoke too soon, just got that problem taken care of. Turns out the issue was that this skin doesn't use an intermediary "settings" page, and the actual settings.xml was empty including the window open and closing animation (hence it just got stuck on the black screen). Easy enough fix to add the animation, hard to locate the problem to resolve it. Kinda like finding a needle in a haystack sometimes. At any rate, one more mystery solved...

@ neo...I'm open for suggestions, if you wanna bounce a couple ideas off of me I'll definitely consider them

neohasse · Post by **neohasse** » Wed Mar 06, 2013 9:48 pm

One thing I noticed now is that when browsing "TV Shows" and choose "All Seasons", the thumbnail isnt there like with an ordinary Season, I think the view was "epguides list" or something like that.
Another thing about the library, when selecting a show, the fanart doesnt turn up automatically, you need to select the first episode for that to happen.

I also would love to mess around/alter the "Recently added" icons right on at the start view. Is there a reason, other than saving ram, that there only is one movie icon there?

I guess that this is what Im going to do for you in the future, nag about stuff that seems unimportant.

whufclee · Post by **whufclee** » Wed Mar 06, 2013 11:39 pm

Ooh if we're doing a wish list I have two things I'd love to see...

1) "Update Library" button added to the movies and tv show sub-menus on homescreen.

2) Addons accessible directly from homescreen similar to Confluence. However what would be totally sweet is if you could incorporate wyrms code from XTV-SAF for adding them, on his skin you can browse for them rather than manually having to type in the path.

Other than that I love it, great work

byron · Post by **byron** » Wed Mar 06, 2013 11:45 pm

neohasse wrote:One thing I noticed now is that when browsing "TV Shows" and choose "All Seasons", the thumbnail isnt there like with an ordinary Season, I think the view was "epguides list" or something like that.

If you can live with using List View for now, I've updated that and now should show all of the thumbs. There are still a few media views that I just haven't gotten around to yet (the ones that have the blue focused bars). I'm currently in the middle of adding custom sub menus right now, so like I said that's gonna have to work for now (List View is actually not that bad).

For the fanart, it's just because The menu starts out on the back button (unless you're using a different view and something is broken?)

neo also wrote:I also would love to mess around/alter the "Recently added" icons right on at the start view. Is there a reason, other than saving ram, that there only is one movie icon there?

I'm guessing that you're using 3.2.1, and recently added won't show up on the stable version because it requires the recently added script which I have removed (looking forward to 3.3). I've been meaning to get around to making an alternate patch for the home menu, I'll try to get around that soon as the new stable is lightning fast and I've been using that version for now.

You're not nagging when I'm asking for feedback, keep it coming (It's hard to catch every little detail when you're altering 90 windows of code)

FYI --- All you have to do to update is download the "Update 720p" from OP and replace the 720 folder via ftp...That should get you the missing thumbs.

byron · Post by **byron** » Thu Mar 07, 2013 6:47 am

Re: [Skin] Rapier Clarity Mod

Postby byron » Thu Mar 07, 2013 5:47 am
@ whufclee...sorry I must have missed your post earlier ---

whufclee wrote:Ooh if we're doing a wish list I have two things I'd love to see...

1) "Update Library" button added to the movies and tv show sub-menus on homescreen.

That was easy enough...added one to Music, Movies and TvShows (good idea)

2) Addons accessible directly from homescreen similar to Confluence. However what would be totally sweet is if you could incorporate wyrms code from XTV-SAF for adding them, on his skin you can browse for them rather than manually having to type in the path.

Please read this: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=788&start=20#p7993 (a bit outdated now, but still gets the idea across to you)

The add-ons window has been a part of this skin for almost two months now, but I've left it switched off in skin settings. It's always been able to be turned on, I just wasn't exactly sure what to link it to so this is good that you're interested (maybe a suggestion?) As it stands right now, it links straight to the main menu of a4x (confluence's add-on menu links to scripts)...I wasn't quite sure what to do with it. No sub menu yet either, wasn't sure what I could/should link that with. Let me know what you think about that for sure, and if you want to use the window just go into skin settings and flip the radio button off (once I get that figured out I'll switch to on in the actual code but for now it's hidden by default).

The music, programs and video sub menu's all have links straight to a4x (to the appropriate add-on category), and at that point all you have to do is click on the sub menu "add-on" button and it will take you right to the content. Not sure if that's what you were talking about or not, but that's the best I had come up with (pretty slick actually). One thing that I've noticed about that though, if it's a fresh install the button won't link until you've actually opened a4x at least one time (not sure why that is, but I don't think it's a skinning error). Anyway, curious as to what you think...and again, glad people are liking it

It's probably about time to start posting some features on the OP

whufclee · Post by **whufclee** » Thu Mar 07, 2013 9:27 am

Thanks for the quick reply, yeah I already found the a4x integration - it's a really good idea. Personally I would have created another seperate menu for all online related stuff. Take a look at the screenshot below, that's what I've setup on my HTPC with the AEON-NOX skin - I know everyone has different tastes but just thought I'd share incase you're interested... The "Online" section has a icons above that go directly to Music, Video, Picture and Program plugins, obviously on xbox we could replace the "Football" one with Scripts and of course if using icons is too difficult we could just use a sub-menu. The sub-menu in the picture below allows you to Install a repo or install an addon, we probably wouldn't need that but maybe we could include "Get Addons" to our sub-menu?

Below is what I was talking about with the addons, sorry I didn't make myself very clear. You can add individual addons to the homescreen. I've taken a pic from Aeon-Nox and Confluence to show you what I mean - it's limited to 5 addons in each category but it's nice to have [removed] and Icefilms accessible from the main menu.

EDIT: By the way, the code for adding the plugins to the homepage is already in the xbmc4xbox version of confluence_lite. It's good but a bit confusing for any noobs as you manually have to enter the path for the addon whereas wyrm added some code to xtv-saf that allows you to simply browse for the addon. Would be very cool if something like that could be added in future