Ed Bott over at ZDNet takes a look at Windows Vista Media Center in: Vista Media Center: Ready for the living room?. Ed starts off with some praise for our previous release:

Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005 is decidedly un-Microsoft-like. For starters, it has a gorgeous interface. It’s a poster child for usability, actually beating TiVo at its own game. It’s fast. And, at least in my household, it’s been surprisingly, almost shockingly reliable.

But then he wonders, will we ‘ruin a good thing?’ Of course not :). For instance the typo on the copyright screen has already been fixed in later builds. He also points to how we handle music albums without cover art:

One glitch that mars the otherwise stellar appearance is the all-caps text that acts as a placeholder for missing art. It’s especially jarring when the movie or album or TV program has a long title that fills the box with ugly text.

I’d disagree. I have a number of albums for which I don’t have cover art and if I had to choose between us putting in a placeholder cover art icon for those albums or putting those titles in, I’d choose the titles. Otherwise I have to give focus to the album in order to know what it is.

Moving on to performance, I’m glad to see that our performance improvements to the music library resulted in an actual improvement for Ed.

In Vista, Microsoft says the performance of searches should be dramatically improved, thanks to the improvements in Windows Media Player 11. I loaded up roughly 15,000 tracks in the library and tried a few searches. The results appeared almost instantly, a huge improvement over Media Center Edition 2005.

Ed also picks up on a bug that really bugged me in MCE 2005:

Unfortunately, both the Album Artist and Artist views in Vista suffer from a bug that has been around for years: entering a letter or two should jump to the first artist whose name begins with those letters, but the jumps don’t work as they do in Album or Genre view.

This will be fixed.

Update: Ed also has an extensive gallery of MCE screenshots.

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Want to beta test our latest and greatest stuff? If you’re into MCX you can sign up to be a XBox Media Center Extender tester. Or if you’re in the Seattle area we’re having a Windows Vista install fair June 10th at the Redmond campus. Bring your PC and we’ll install Vista on it. If you’re interested email me and I’ll forward you an email with more details.

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