Response to Chris Prillo’s Windows Vista Feedback
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.
Comments(4)
But you wouldn’t have to update the image every time you load the start menu – once a week would be fine I’m sure – schedule it to happen in the middle of the night, save it out as a png (or whatever)..
Right, that’s definitely an option, however it significantly increases the complexity. Not enough benefit for the risk/cost.
That’s a completely fair answer, thanks.
It also makes sense considering how many albums I have that don’t have any album art. Maybe I’m old school but at least a 3rd of collection comes from my 500+ CD collection and I still haven’t made time to go hunt for album art.
As a tangent, and something you probably have zero control over, that is one thing that WMP11 could do better. It would be nice if you could select “Find Album Info” and do all the songs in one nice batch instead of having to find the album info one track at a time. I’m thinking something that shows all the tracks for the found album, something that shows all the tracks in the album you selected in WMP 11 and you just map the tracks to each other (if it can’t auto-map).
Currently the “Find Album Info” feature is so slow and unwieldly for doing more than a single track that it’s more like one of those panini sandwich makers. Great in concept but such a pain to dig out and go through the process that it just sits in the back of your cabinet.