[WIP] Aeon (2017)

Merry Christmas, everyone. It’s been a while!

Back in 2008 I made a skin for XBMC called Aeon. The idea was for a 1080p UI built around high-res artwork, making movies, TV and video feel like more than just ones and zeroes. A lot was achieved, but ultimately it was too much. Feature creep and bloat had almost erased the original vision by the time Aeon was abandoned, less complete than ever, in 2009. Other skinners made their own versions thereafter, but I’ve always felt the original was lost back in ’08, when I got too carried away with gimmicks and experiments.

Guess what. Aeon is returning in 2017. Same name, same concept, three kids now but whatever I got the itch to do this nonsense again.

It is: personal, focused, simple, robust, art-sensitive (thanks to amazing work from Dan Reid on an Aeon-specific Colorbox plugin).

It is not: for everyone, a Kodi feature showcase, textured (it uses almost no textures at all, and even the icons are TTF), done till it’s done.

With the exception of the ‘now playing’ music stuff, which is concept, here’s it running in Kodi Krypton (click for 1080p).

Movies browser can be toggled between posters and slideshows of portrait ‘keyart’ for each movie, stored in the movie’s local folder, as shown here. The skin colour-matches all artwork with seamless transitions.

Music browser (and certain other screens) will use randomly generated geometric backdrops (static here as not yet implemented).