Public beta is available. You might have to do a refresh in my repo add-on for Grid to appear in the list. I will merge the first post with the info below later. I have some other stuff to take care of now, so I'll won't be around most of the day. Do post any questions you may have and I will try to answer them as soon as possible. Cheers.
INTRODUCTION
For the last couple of years (eight I believe, gasp) I have been the designer and developer of reFocus. About 8 to 10 months ago, new concepts started to emerge in my head. Coupled with some older concepts that didn't fit in reFocus these have led to what turned into this new skin. Grid takes a minimalistic, sensible and performance driven approach, something people who know about my previous work will probably recognise. The name is derived from one of it’s main design / development principles where all elements are laid out on a virtual grid to enforce a visual consistency. When I was watching / listening to Tron while coding one evening, it became obvious what the name of the skin was going to be.
COMPATIBILITY
Grid is compatible with Kodi 17 / Krypton only at the moment.
SPECIAL THANKS
Over two months ago I put together a small team of beta testers, which has been one of the best decisions I ever made with regards to skinning for Kodi. It allowed me to share Grid and get feedback but still work on the skin “in quiet”.
Therefore I would like to send out huge thanks for their time, effort and dedication spent on this project to the following people, in alphabetical order:
- BigDaddyRal
- Donderstraal
- FrissonReynald
- KOKONUTCREME
- loggio
- monkeyboyohyeah
- Rafał Wójcik
- Slurrp
This skin has gotten better because of you and developing it has been even more fun because of you too. Cheers guys
MORE THANKS
I, and the whole skinning community, owe a lot to many people. A couple of them immediately come to mind with regards to Grid seeing the light of day.
- BobCratchett, thanks for putting up with my crazy ideas and requests (again) and offering such clear help and advice on Skin Shortcuts;
- marcelveldt, thanks for creating Skin Helper. It truly is a great helper that has opened up many new possibilities;
- jurialmunkey, for not only being a great skinner but also a great help around the skinning dev forum to many people, including your’s truly;
- badaas, for creating colorbox. Support for colorbox was added very late in Grid’s development (and I plan to expand the support after the public beta) but it has already given it such a nice extra touch;
- phil65, I can't live without KodiDevKit anymore.
And last but not least my love for putting up with all my geek hobbies and projects that take up far too much time.
FAQ
Please take note of these
here before posting. To be updated later.
FEATURE REQUESTS
During the public beta I will
not be taking any feature requests. During this period I want to focus completely on stability and making this as bug free as possible. After the public beta I will be open to them. With that being said, I have to express though that I am not a crowd pleaser. If someone has a great idea, it would be stupid for me to ignore it. But I don’t make “Swiss army knife” type skins. As such I carefully select which features can be added in a way that fit in with the skin and my vision. That design / development principle make my skins what they are, for better or for worse.
LANGUAGE SUPPORT
Grid supports Cyrillic (extended), Greek (extended), Hebrew, Latin (extended) and Vietnamese characters. Select the appropriate font for your language in Settings > Interface > Skin > Fonts. Any other language is supported through the Unicode (Arial) fontset, but this comes with compromises in looks and usability.
PLANNED UPDATES & IMPROVEMENTS- Improvements the the "out of the box experience". As in first launch instructions / menu indicators to help discoverability of features and menus.
- More clear and logical configuration of the widgets. These require changes in the Skin Shortcuts add-on however. Please see my explanation about this here.
GOOD TO KNOW
Widgets
The widgets implementation in Grid takes a bit of a different approach than any skin I am aware of. Please see my explanation about this
here.
Expectation management
This skin is not for you if the following things are important to you:
- CD Art, spinning discs;
- At least 10 different viewtypes for every content type;
- A visibility switch for anything you see on screen;
- Loads of animations;
- Details about everything. I don't implement features for the sake of adding features, the same goes for metadata. I really couldn't care less about how much money a movie earned or what it's budget was. And in the odd occasion that I do want to know, I have a smartphone beside me that offers a much better way to obtain that information.
- Logo's everywhere;
- Multiple artwork types per viewtype. It comes down to every viewtype being centered around 1 particular artwork type. A second artwork type is only shown when it makes sense / serves a purpose. That's why you will not see tv show logo's when browsing one particular tv show because....you already know what tv show you're browsing. When you browse your recently added episodes however, having tv show logo's makes sense as it helps you differentiate upon first glance;
- Mouse support. I think the overall design would lend itself quite well for touch operation, with some alterations / additions. So while I may do that in a future version, for now mouse support is not supported;
- Never leave the homescreen;
- You need to see something else everytime you scroll
REQUIRED & SUPPORTED ADD-ONS
More info on the add-ons required and/or supported by Grid can be found
here. If you are getting a “dependencies not met” error when installing Grid, you are missing one or more of these add-ons. The required add-ons are all available for install through the official Kodi repo. Some of the required add-ons are not, or Grid requires a newer version that is not on Kodi’s repository yet. Those add-ons are available through my repository add-on.
DOWNLOAD & INSTALL
For now, Grid is only available through my repository add-on. You can download it
here. During the public beta stage I will be releasing several more releases through this add-on depending on the number of issues that arise. After that, the skin will be submitted to the Kodi repo and the Grid’s Github repository will be opened up to everyone.
Special notice about the Colorbox script:
You will need a newer version of this script that is not on Kodi’s repository yet. Install through my repository add-on or
badaas' Github repo until it is please.
