So, I've been using Kodi for the past few days, and it's pretty great. My biggest pet peeve, however, is that all of the skins and Kodi itself are not friendly to desktop/laptop and mouse usage. This is not merely a skin problem, and I do not consider Unity, Quartz, Mousetuary, and Confluence mouse/desktop friendly, even if the mouse mostly works better on them.
I would like thoughts on whether it might be possible to implement this, and how one might do it. I personally think having some options to fix up the mouse and desktop friendliness of Kodi will significantly improve the application in general.
Usage requirements:
1. Mouse and scrollwheel should behave correctly. Scrollwheel should scroll at a normal speed in all scrollable-panes. Currently, it seems to scroll normally in some panes, at least for certain skins, but there are some specific panes where it does not (scrollable settings panes, for example).
2. Moving the mouse should not autoscroll anything. The scrollwheel should scroll, not the mouse, and if you need horizontal scrolling, then you add a button on the left and right edges of the pane to scroll left and right. For examples of this, see Disney+'s website, Netflix's website, etc.
3. Vertical scrolling of grids is preferable. As an example, look at the desktop websites for Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin. Defin is another great example for a native GTK app.
4. Popups should not display on hover. They should display on click. Again, Plex, Emby, Jellyfin, Disney+, Netflix, etc. all work this way, because it's what is standard for desktop use.
5. Window mode that does not scale the interface (especially the text) based on height, but shrinks the sizes of panes (and moves them around, collapses them, etc.) based on width. Aka. responsive design. Text sizes should not be changing based on window size!!!!!!
6. All skins that use a giant horizontal-scrolling menu on the homepage are out of the question, and yes, this includes both Unity, Confluence, Quartz, and many other skins. No desktop app works like this. Instead, similar to the default skin, you have a sidebar of pages, or links at the top to pages, then you can have tabs at the top of each page and sections in the main content of the page. Good examples include Disney+ and Emby/Plex/Jellyfin, and even Delphin which is an example of a very minimal interface with just tabs at the top and no sections.
Now, people can obviously use VLC or Emby/Plex/Jellyfin, but I think Kodi offers many advantages over the others:
* Kodi has way more addons to different services that you just can't get with Emby, Plex, Jellyfin, VLC, MPV, or any other media player.
* It's not as heavy as a webbrowser.
* It's design even with all the problems detailed above is already better than most desktop media players, and really the major thing would significantly improve Kodi is to have a static scale based on the DPI of the OS.
* It has a very wide feature set, more than most media players outside of VLC.
* It has different display styles, like thumbnails, fanart, and posters, that VLC does not really have.
I would like thoughts on whether it might be possible to implement this, and how one might do it. I personally think having some options to fix up the mouse and desktop friendliness of Kodi will significantly improve the application in general.
Usage requirements:
1. Mouse and scrollwheel should behave correctly. Scrollwheel should scroll at a normal speed in all scrollable-panes. Currently, it seems to scroll normally in some panes, at least for certain skins, but there are some specific panes where it does not (scrollable settings panes, for example).
2. Moving the mouse should not autoscroll anything. The scrollwheel should scroll, not the mouse, and if you need horizontal scrolling, then you add a button on the left and right edges of the pane to scroll left and right. For examples of this, see Disney+'s website, Netflix's website, etc.
3. Vertical scrolling of grids is preferable. As an example, look at the desktop websites for Plex, Emby, and Jellyfin. Defin is another great example for a native GTK app.
4. Popups should not display on hover. They should display on click. Again, Plex, Emby, Jellyfin, Disney+, Netflix, etc. all work this way, because it's what is standard for desktop use.
5. Window mode that does not scale the interface (especially the text) based on height, but shrinks the sizes of panes (and moves them around, collapses them, etc.) based on width. Aka. responsive design. Text sizes should not be changing based on window size!!!!!!
6. All skins that use a giant horizontal-scrolling menu on the homepage are out of the question, and yes, this includes both Unity, Confluence, Quartz, and many other skins. No desktop app works like this. Instead, similar to the default skin, you have a sidebar of pages, or links at the top to pages, then you can have tabs at the top of each page and sections in the main content of the page. Good examples include Disney+ and Emby/Plex/Jellyfin, and even Delphin which is an example of a very minimal interface with just tabs at the top and no sections.
Now, people can obviously use VLC or Emby/Plex/Jellyfin, but I think Kodi offers many advantages over the others:
* Kodi has way more addons to different services that you just can't get with Emby, Plex, Jellyfin, VLC, MPV, or any other media player.
* It's not as heavy as a webbrowser.
* It's design even with all the problems detailed above is already better than most desktop media players, and really the major thing would significantly improve Kodi is to have a static scale based on the DPI of the OS.
* It has a very wide feature set, more than most media players outside of VLC.
* It has different display styles, like thumbnails, fanart, and posters, that VLC does not really have.