Ed Bott on MCE in Windows Vista
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.
Comments(9)
The album title is fine, but who decided to make it all-caps? Take another look at the screenshot: all other text on the screen in lower-case. I think that’s Ed’s complaint.
Agreed, the all-caps looks fairly hack’ish. This is something I had figured was a palceholder for future development. At the very least it should contain upper/lower case letters.
As someone who uses two XBOX 1’s as media center extender, an XBOX 360 as a MCX, and owns a dual-core media center gateway, I was expecting more significant features to be added to media center. It appears that media center is getting more of an evolutionary update rather than a revolutionary one. I was particularly hoping to be able to watch TV and listen to music at the same time through the media center. Sports fans tend to do things like watch a game while listening to music. I was also hoping that whole-house music broadcasting would be implemented so that I can have my media center and all extenders playing the same music simultaneously. This would be perfect for me being that I have 3 MCX’s and the media center pc itself. Also, a more direct integration of Directv with HD support would have been nice, considering there’s a lot of talk about Cable Card support going around. Finally, it’d be nice if Urge was actually integrated into the media center interface as well as being accessible from WMP 11.
Re: Capitalization. I asked around today and we definitely examined all options. However, our design team felt that an all caps treatment was more asthetically pleasing then all lower caps, or leaving the strings as is.
You’d probably be surprised to find out just how much time our design team spends agonizing over small decisions like capitalization. So, we’re just going to have to trust them on this one.
The capitalisation thing is surprising coming from the design team, as I thought it was a fairly well understood principle of typography that all caps is harder to read than mixed case. That’s, like, why we have lower case letters, isn’t it?
Various bits of MCE’s UI use ALL CAPITALS and it always seems jarring when I see them on screen.
A BIT LIKE HOW IRRITATING THIS TEXT SEEMS RIGHT NOW, FOR INSTANCE.
Hi, just googled into your site and as a user i want to add some comment, dont get me wrong i think MCE is great but not always. :P
[quote]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.[/quote]
Well, seems the man it not so thrilled about the “normal” Windows :D. About it’s usability, it’s not, from all the people i know there are only a few i’d recommend Windows Media Center to. You really need to have some patience and skill to set it up (even the basic setup) and the chance you’ll run into some major problems is fairly great. You need a 1000 euro computer to do what can be done with a 150 euro harddisc recorder and the peole that plug a XBox 360 into MCE, whats that about, what can XBox do that can’t be done with MCCE. Plugins are a joke, most are made by people that mean well but seriously, paying for a Skype/Soduko/Outlook plugin? Where are the Microsoft plugins? The Radio Tuner is a joke, only 9 channels without stereo indicator, signal strength indicator, station name and the auto tuning that doen’t work. There is the repetitive sound when you switch from tv to radio and vice versa, the soundcard should mute when doing that. There’s the problem with updating Windows, so i’ve switched it off and check once a week manually. There’s still no webbrowser that works like it should. Everything you want to change, improve or adjust needs to be done in the register, not everybody is that skilled or patient or know where to look.
[quote]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.[/quote]
Come on, just press those letter in a search engine and you’ll find any album art you want.
I see that Ed Bott’s outlook on Vista Media Center is taken very seriously. But, where does a normal user like myself that has over 2,000 dollars invested in Media center and extender products go to voice my opinion on what features should be included in future versions of Media Center? I see that the XBOX team really relies on user feedback, as well as their own desired features, when considering updates to the 360 dashboard. Does the Media Center team work in a similar fashion? Just curious…
Tim, I’m sure our usability team would agree with you but it’s our design team who made the call on that decision.
Pinobot, thanks for the feedback, I’ll make sure my team members hear about those issues. And when you have 40+ gigs of music with 20% missing covers, it takes a fair amount of time to google for all the album art and drop it in place!
Sportsunit, we have lots of bloggers on the MCE team who receive feedback via their blogs and spend lots of time reading blogs of regular users. We as a team also spend a lot of time reading feedback on the newsgroups and in forums like thegreenbutton.com and avsforum.com. You’re also welcome to email any members of the MCE team who have put their email addresses online (mine is matt.goyer@microsoft.com). More formally, we solicit user feedback through numerous focus groups and usability studies.
In terms of usability is it possible to turn of the thumbnails in the video library in Vista Media Centre? When you have a number of files in a directory (say
episodes of a TV series) the thumbnails are useless for distinguishing them apart and you have to hover over each thumbnail to look at the file name.
I know you can select “View List” in the Recorded TV Programs part of the interface, so why not in the Video Library as well?