[Buschel]

Did some more work in the past days. On top of the playlist update debouncing I reworked a lot of the animation and state machine logic. It is simpler now, and I hope this will be easier to maintain in future. Now the animation does not "bounce" anymore, but just quickly fades in and out. So it is less prominent, but still visible. The whole animation now also properly waits for fade out to be finished before reloading the table, and then waits for the loading to finish before fading in again. This makes the animation experience a lot smoother and less "hectic". As part of this journey I specifically revisited the party mode handling which should now give a lot better animation experience. Nasty fact in all of this is that there are setups which have TCP connection (= notifications can be received) and setups which have not (= polling required). So there is plenty of room for new issues ...

Alongside with NowPlaying work I fixed some minor problems and added support to search in cast, tagline and plot in Global Search. This should give some more value for this feature.

@UlfSchmidt, you will love to see I finally prepared this: https://github.com/xbmc/Official-Kodi-Re.../pull/1084

[Buschel]

1.15 Release is out on AppStore!

Big Thank You to

• @kambala for reviewing, being patient with me, merging, building and handling AppStore. 
  
• @UlfSchmidt and @amasephy for intensive testing, honest feedback and for helping to make this a better App
  
• everyone who supports with translating, testing TF builds and sharing feedback or suggestions
  

[UlfSchmidt]

@UlfSchmidt, you will love to see I finally prepared this: https://github.com/xbmc/Official-Kodi-Re.../pull/1084

You know it already, but I really appreciate your work, especially when you implement something where it seems to be only me who asks for changes.

In the meantime I made some progress in the direction to become a more active contributor. VM is up and running. Next steps during my summer vacation (but only in case of very bad weather).

[Buschel]

1.16 build 4465.42

The first build after the release is a pure test build to verify a large set of changes around

• playlist update debouncing
  
• starting slideshow differently
  
• playlist update animation, especially during party mode
  
• internal logic for playback / playlists
  

@UlfSchmidt, now I am curious to hear about the performance for starting your vacation pictures slideshow

@amasephy, the playlist animations for party mode should be improved quite a bit, as well as staying on picture playlist when videos are part of a slideshow

[UlfSchmidt]

I received this updated early and tested it already, with impressive performance improvements!
And, not only this, everything I tested worked really flawlessly. Such much better than any version before.
No flickering playlists when adding a bunch of images. No notable delays when starting huge slideshows any longer.

This is it! I am happy! 😃 Thanks!

[Buschel]

Cool, this is what I really like to hear 👍

[amasephy]

The two fixes you implemented for me seem to be working as intended. 👍🏻


Edit: Seems there is a problem. If you have a slideshow going and you start party mode then party mode initiates but the icon that illuminates turns off. Party mode is indeed still activated though as navigating the playlist fills in more songs as expected in party mode.

Edit 2:

A couple minor formatting things I noticed. It’s a toss up of you want to change them. They’re differences between the app and Kodi server.

For audio tracks codec labels

Kodi server: 128kbps
Kodi app: 128 kbit\s

Server: 32bit (all lower case)
App: 32 Bit (Title case)


Edit 3: Regarding the new party mode animation fix. Sometimes when skipping to the next song it’s truly seamless and pushes up the next song and pops the top one off the list. However most of the time there’s a delay and the spinner appears. In either case the playlist flickers probably refreshing function? Still, if it’s sometimes able to do the pop and push without a full refresh why can’t it always do that?

Edit 4: seems the fix to stop displaying the elapsed time panel over the photo in a slide show playlist had a side effect of it not displaying on a song if you have music playing at the same time.

[Buschel]

Thanks. I see the problem with the PartyMode icon and the missing elapsed time. These are side effects of attempting to fix the slideshow jumping playlists when playing a video. Will look into possibilities to handle this different. Not too easy ...

The slight residual flickering in PartyMode is hard a nut to crack as well ... This is all l linked to the fact that there are different triggers for a playlist update. The one you see is the safety net which is needed to detect a new song started -- this is a must and does not use animation but still shows the activity indicator. Other triggers are events sent from Kodi or when pressing skip buttons. I need to think through this to see, if I can only keep the must-keep trigger and animate it fully.

[UlfSchmidt]

Just my thoughts about this topic:

A couple minor formatting things I noticed. It’s a toss up of you want to change them. They’re differences between the app and Kodi server.

For audio tracks codec labels

Kodi server: 128kbps
Kodi app: 128 kbit\s

Server: 32bit (all lower case)
App: 32 Bit (Title case)

The labeling and formatting of bit rates even differs from skin to skin, as such things are not specified by Kodi itself. So, from my point of view, no need for @Buschel to change anything.

[amasephy]

Thanks UlfSchmidt. I had no idea it was skin related. I just use Estuary these days. I gave up on the community skins when most of the devs started abandoning my favorite old school ones.

[Buschel]

Next little thing with a lot of work behind was some topic I couldn't focus on for a long time: settings controller. Now the labels are not using hardcoded dimensions anymore, but just match the required size. No trouble in future with new (longer) translations! @amasephy, you remember you once figured that one of the settings description was not fitting the available space?

Screenshots (top = new, bottom = before):

[amasephy]

Very nice. I actually completely forgot about this! Now if 20.1 would come out so I can actually go into the settings menu on the app…

[Buschel]

Along the same lines:
- Flexible height for virtual keyboard (the ones which pops up on the app when a keyboard is required by Kodi UI): https://ibb.co/kcSj4w0
- Index overlay (iPad fullscreen only): https://ibb.co/Hg3bSr5

Season/album view will be using a "disclosure" button to move to the details: https://ibb.co/GCZwHy8
For now I just keep the behavior like it was. You need to click the button (now: the arrow) to move to details. Clicking the cell anywhere expands/collapses the season. It might be better to only expand/collapse when hitting the season cover or the left arrow-indicator, and move to details when clicking the cell in general. I personally feels this would be more in line with how other cells with a disclosure indicator behave in iOS. But I will wait for your feedback on this once it is shared in a build.

A nice one was finding the party mode indicator showing an oval shape. There was quite some underlying mess going on. Also improved a lot and now looking a lot better with long translation texts: https://ibb.co/ckSwBzj

Also I found some really nasty bugs in the Live TV / Radio are which crept in when Live TV was split into Live TV and Radio and when the recordings became synchronizable. Finally this resulted in wrong channel list layout after recordings were shown. Only the current program (not the next) was shown, and it was shown in a wrong font.

[UlfSchmidt]

I still find it fascinating how many errors you still uncover in this app. And at the same time it scares me when I think of other, much more complex software. "Full self driving". Nuclear missiles. Whatever… (just weekend thoughts)

[amasephy]

I’ve thought the same thing with the bugs. Everytime I think we’ve got to be close to running out of bugs to possibly find something new turns up. To be fair to developers a lot of times bugs seem to creep in with new OS updates, new devices etc. so things that never were a bug become one eventually despite using best coding practices.

Bigger apps likely have more than one volunteer developer and two testing volunteers.🙂

Still one wonders what we would find digging under the hood of other things. 😨