Skin request

[Cactus]

hi,

i've been fooling around with the xbmc skins and i have a few suggestions that would my my life (as a skinner) a lot easier.

at first i would suggest a buttonscroller that can be use outside of the homepage. it should be less complicated; no need to give the user control over such buttons so moving buttons and adding or removing them wouldn't be needed. it might look something like:
<buttonscroller>
*...
*...
*<scrollerbuttons>
* *<control>
* * *<type>button</type>
* * *...
* * *...
* *</control> * *
* *<control>
* * *<type>button</type>
* * *...
* * *...
* *</control>
*</scrollerbuttons>
</buttonscroller>


what would also be great is a way to implement spincontrols and listcontrols that one could populate them selfs. it seems these types of controls only work if some hardcoded procedure is supplying them with data.

what i also would like to have are buttons/controls that can hold multiple lined-labels. they would be even better is there was a way (textoffsetx/textoffsety?) to display part of the label.

a way to refresh/reload a single xml file. this would give us the possibility to dynamic skin files that were created on the fly using python or something. maybe even a way load load a skin file t will, without loading them at startup.

and (as if this wasn't asked for b4 yet) a bit of documentation would realy be appreciated. i know going through skins will learn you much about what control can do for you, but i've looked a long time at the settingscategory.xml to name one but i don't get it @ all.

these are the suggestions/request i have, i hope you find them usefull enough to implement them.

cheers
cacti

[jmarshall]

nothing will be implemented unless there is a genuine reason for it being there.

give examples of what you want to be able to do.

[Cactus]

hi mr. marshall,

nothing particual, just more possibility while creating skins. since i know you can add you own new screens/windows i've been fooling around with it for a while and those were the things i missed.

i wanted to recreate a tvguide because scripts that are floating around aren't what i wanted. i could have done that (mce style) with the suggestions i made.
i know that a lot can be done with python, but then you need some coding experience.

since all funcionality of the new functions already is in xbmc i thought it wouldn't be a big thing to ajust them.

thanks anyways,
cheers
cacti

[jmarshall]

how were you planning to fill listcontrols from the skin?

i'm happy to entertain ideas that produce constructive improvements in skinning that will be used and offers significant advantages over the current methods. however, i am not prepared to code up stuff that has marginal use and/or no obvious use at all.

if you come up with real stuff that you want to do but you can't currently (ie concrete examples of exactly what you want to achieve) then perhaps we can discuss it and see what we can come up with.

note that multi-line labels can be done using the label control which is multi-line by default. further more you can use textbox's if you want multi-page/scrolling ability etc.

cheers,
jonathan