Chris Prillo has an excellent post giving us lots of feedback on Windows Vista. He even has a small amount of feedback for the MCE team:

The new Media Center software is amazing. However, the buttons to dig deeper into the different sections seem to be using stock images rather than actual thumbnails on your machine. Sloppy, or intentional? If intentional, why?

Here’s the button he’s talking about (we refer to it as a tile).

The stock photos in the Start Menu tiles are intentional. The reason we can’t generate the tiles based on actual content in your libraries is that it would severly impact the performance of the start menu because for each tile representing a library we’d need to crawl the library, extract thumbnails, resize them, turn them into a composite image, etc. all before we can render the Start Menu!

Originally we were disappointed that the tiles couldn’t be representative, but given how small the images are in the tile I don’t know how helpful it would be to actually have your collection represented by the tile. So in the case, I think we definitely made the right decision to trade design for performance.

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On the Windows Vista site Tony Northrup has an article on Digital Pictures in Media Center
for Windows Vista looking at some of the basic photo tasks that you can accomplish with Media Center:

Media Center reclaims something we could have lost when we switched from film to digital: gathering the family around the photo album. With Media Center, you can handle every step of the digital photography process without touching a keyboard or mouse.

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Bill Gates mentions Media Center in his WinHEC keynote the other day:

In terms of form factors for the Windows PC, one of the great successes over the last several years has been Media Center Edition of Windows. A year ago it was a little bit of a phenomenon, two years ago it really didn’t exist. It’s this year that we’re getting all of the elements to come together, the connections to the cable video, the satellite video, connecting up to those standards on a global basis, and people really can expect the PC to be the place where everything comes together, video over the Internet, where the innovation is great, but also the traditional video sources coming together into one place. So that energy we’ve put around Media Center has paid off in a very big way.

I couldn’t agree more, Windows Vista will really be the release where Media Center comes together.

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