Some visual feedback on Amber Krypton

Hey team. Now that I’ve had a week to get used to Amber’s latest iteration, I’d like to offer some feedback on some of the new visual choices.

So, I like that the skin is constantly evolving, and for the most part, I like the new changes. But there’s one issue that I think detracts from the overall design. Namely, there’s a lot of wasted space in the new TV show List view. I brought some pictorial examples. (I got my images of the old Amber from the Youtube showcase videom, because I’m way too lazy to install an old Kodi just to try and make this point.)

First. Viewing TV shows in list view used to look like this:

Now, they look like this:

Do you see what I mean about wasted space here? Even for episodes that have longer descriptions, there’s still these giant… voids… in odd places. The old version had some blank space too, but it wasn’t anywhere near as pronounced as this. I’m hardly an artist but I think the old style worked better here, even if it didn’t leave as much space for episode information. You got a much bigger thumbnail and more space for the episode names. But if we can’t have that back, then maybe it’d be worth repositioning the elements somehow.

Okay. That’s my biggest nitpick. The rest of the update is pretty great.

Oh, and one more thing – I’m using the Jarvis-style shelves. What happened to the “update shelves when you enter the home screen” option? I loved the way it was always throwing up new random movies.

Cheers, Tim