Suggestions from a long-time tester, new "10-foot" user...

[jbrinker]

Last week I finally had all the hardware and decided to take the "plunge" for real. Ive been using MP on my desktop for over a year (at work and home), and am overall very pleased with it (Major congrats to the devs on a great piece of SW).

At home I set up a PC for use in our livingroom. I just wanted to share some thoughts about some aspects of the design that I feel would enhance the experience and improve WAF.

(In no particular order)

[Overall and MyTV]

- Add option to have MP start in "Live TV" rather than main menu
- Enhance or add a better "mini EPG" - something you can scan for "what else is on" at the bottom of the screen while still watching full screen. Ideally this would be "transparent" as well. (See Dish Network receivers or many STB's).
- Ive had trouble with the timing of direct channel changing - i.e. Im on chan 9. I want to go directly to chan 42. I type 4 2 on the remote, and 50% of the time it goes to channel 4. Is there a timing adjustment available for this? Less now that I use the MCE remote and receiver, but it still happens. This might just be "me" or my hardware.

[My Videos and other "list select" based modules]

- When attempting to navagate through a list, especially when in "icon" or "large icon" view, the curson does not behave as I think it should. Once I navagate "right" to enter the list, and I continue navagating to the right, it should scroll through all the items in the list. Instead, it goes over three (or however many there are in row 1) and then goes back to the "menu". It seems to me that once I leave the "menu" and "drive" into the list, I should be able to drive through the list with continues "rights". Perhaps an Esc or "menu" should be required to get back to the "menu" on the left. Or drive to the top row. Do you see my point? This is how virtually all "arrow button" driven UI's that Ive used work.

[My Weather]

- Id love to see a few enhancements to My Weather:
- Ability to add/remove maps at will. I.e. user defined rather than staticly defined "humidity", "precip" etc. user should be able to define what each is called, and how many are available.
- Textual forecast screens - i.e. scrape the forecast (text) from the WC site or the NWS and format into a couple text screens.
- EAS screens. Would be cool if the emergency weather alerts could be formatted into a text page (red background of course) and shown first.
- "Auto Weather Channel Mode" - upon entering My Weather, the forecast screen is displayed for n seconds, then Text Forecast, map #1, map #2, etc etc. in a loop. No one in the family except me bothers "checking" the other screens, since it requires navagation. I think this would be a huge WAF improvement.

(I've used Mythtv as well, and Myth's weather is close to what I request, other than the EAS stuff)

[My Music]/[Myphotos]

- I may just be dense but it seems that sometimes I cannot just select a folder (I tend to use the folder nav, since thats how my mp3s are stored - artist/album) and hit play. It would be cool if it supported recursice folder playlisting (on the fly). I.e. I navagate to "beck" and hit play. It plays all the beck albums listed under beck.

- My Photos same thing. Why cant I navagate to a folder, and hit "play" to get a slide-show of that folder? (And any/all subfolders)? Again, perhaps Im dense, but this is an area that doesnt seem to be very intuitive.


Finally, I really want to THANK everyone - I tried MCE as well and I think MP is better. Its about 90% of the way "there" - and ONLY lags MCE in the final fit and finish category (UI consistancy, tweaking actions and controls). In every other way it seems superior - and thats without considering the server/client factor. It even is MORE stable (for me anyway). MCE crashed on me about every day or two.

(P.s. Im trying to teach myself some C# so I can possibly help out... Id really love to tackle the weather module stuff)

J

[Inker]

Originally Posted by jbrinker

- When attempting to navagate through a list, especially when in "icon" or "large icon" view, the curson does not behave as I think it should. Once I navagate "right" to enter the list, and I continue navagating to the right, it should scroll through all the items in the list. Instead, it goes over three (or however many there are in row 1) and then goes back to the "menu". It seems to me that once I leave the "menu" and "drive" into the list, I should be able to drive through the list with continues "rights". Perhaps an Esc or "menu" should be required to get back to the "menu" on the left. Or drive to the top row. Do you see my point? This is how virtually all "arrow button" driven UI's that Ive used work.

Interesting. The Icon view utilizes vertical scroll, so by going and selecting the first item you would scroll by pressing down. The behaviour you describe is by design. Would you expect the icon view to scroll horitonatlly (like the thumbnail view does)? Besides Vista MCE can you provide other GUIs that scroll horizontal as you describe? Windows Explorer for instance in Icon view behaves the same way MP does.

Thanks for your feedback.

[jbrinker]

Thanks for the reply... I guess I was thinking like this:

When I select "videos" I start in the "menu" half of the screen. I move to the right, and everything works as Id expect (drive left, right, up down etc). However, I find that on many occasions when "driving" I inadvertly scroll to the right, expecting that as I reach the edge the cursor will return to the left-most position on the next line (CR LF). But instead, it returns to the menu and I "loose" track of it.

I guess my suggestion was to make entering the "list" a different "bucket" so to speak. You move from the menu to the list and you are "stuck" over there until you either escape via some button, or drive back to the top.

If I open up windows explorer, and navagate to a folder (left pane) and hit "tab" to move to the right pane, (Icons view) Im stuck in the right panel and can navagate with the arrows without accideltally popping back to the left pane. I know, totally different interface, but its a WAF / user expectations thing.

While I was thinking about this, I had another side-thought. If the cursor were more visible (noticable) it might be easier to not "get sidetracked" so to speak. With the new animations is it possible to have "flashing" cursor (well, not flashing exactly, but say a rolling brightness thing, or anamation of some sort)?

These are ALL minor issues, but since I have helped with QA testing where I work I tend to focus on these "first time user" experiences.

Thanks to all!!!

J

[Inker]

Now I understand, I actually thought you expected it to keep scrolling to the right and showing you more items in this scenerio.

The way you describe would certainly be possible, however I think it would be even more confusing to users, since now they are stuck in the list. How do I get out? Press Esc...well thats fine if you know about it, but what if you dont? I can see this more of a problem then what you describe.

The not noticible enough "cursor (I assume you mean the highligthed item) is something that can be work upon. Frankly though I don't think it was brought up alot in the past. As far as flashy goes it is certainly something that the Team is looking into, however flashy is dangerous when overdone. But expect these kinds of effects in teh future.

Again, thanks for you feedback.

[chili]

Originally Posted by jbrinker

- Add option to have MP start in "Live TV" rather than main menu

http://www.team-mediaportal.com/file...ion/Autostart/

[jbrinker]

awesome... as with (nearly) everything around here, someone else already thought of it :-)

Thanks!
Jeff