Inspired mostly by Apple TV and MediaStream skin, Quartz skin brings fast, simple, easy to navigate and flexible user interface. It’s friendly to non-technical users and low powered devices like Apple TV2. Quartz’s main goal is to provide simple and elegant UI with some customization possibilities. pecinko, the skin author, started by calling it Nox. In his words,
NOX has grown up and his friends are calling him Quartz.
Since then, Quartz was added to XBMC official Dharma repository and is available to everybody that uses XBMC and enjoys simple, light XBMC skins. Just head on to XBMC addons manager, skins section and install. XBMC Eden 11.0 users aren’t that lucky. At least not for now. XBMC Eden 11.0 is still under development and developers/maintainers of XBMC skins need time to catch up. For the same reason, expect some bugs and instability. Some manual work is in order to use this XBMC skin with a XBMC Eden 11.0 Nightly Build. Not that hard installing the Quartz skin, really. Just… manual work!
Adding Quartz to XBMC Eden 11.0
Note: Please read everything before proceeding. Make sure you understand every step first. I’m not responsible for any loss of content or messed up systems.
- Go to XBMC Plugins Unofficial Repositories page
- Read that page. It contains important information regarding XBMC repositories
- Download pecinko’s repository file
- Save the file to a location accessible by XBMC addons manager
- Start XBMC and go to System >> Add-ons >> Install from zip file
- Browse to the folder where you saved the file and select xbmc.repo.aeonmq.2.zip
- Restart XBMC to make it aware of the new repository
- Go to System >> Add-ons >> Get Add-ons >> Pecinko’s Repository >> Skin and hit Enter on Quartz
- A pop-up screen awakes. Choose install Quartz skin
- XBMC will ask you if you want to activate the skin. Obviously, answer yes
Not that hard, was it? Quartz is another most welcome addition to XBMC skins. Specially because Quartz skin is light, runs super smooth on underpowered devices and still brings a lot of functionality to the table. If you like the skin, consider giving pecinko some feedback and a thanks.
