Ranting Kenya

Now that my new computer has arrived, I’ve had a chance to play around with Windows Media Center included with Windows Home Premium. I have clicked around Media Center before, so I had some idea of what to expect. I would also like to preface this by saying I haven’t used a TiVo before.

Media Center immediately makes me mad angry at my cable provider. I can’t get the digital channels, and obviously that includes the HD channels. That is a huge let down, because this product is excellent. It has features for every possible contingency. The guide is snappy, the interface is efficient and good looking, the program loads quickly, it’s generally very good all-around.

One thing I’ve noticed, is that the PVR functions are working without any hitches. On my Motorola 6416 PVR, which works just good enough that I don’t run it over in my car, pausing usually skips a couple frames, same for pressing play afterwards, sometimes the sound goes down, or the picture goes wonky. None of that happens in Media Center. It’s very polished by comparison.

Sports

As a sports fan, I suppose I could complain since there’s not dual tuners for PIP or using two channel buffers. However, this is pretty much as good as it gets with only one tuner. In the sports section, you get to watch a sporting event in a “windowed” screen. But, around the reduced size video, is a ticker of the other sports games across the top. So you may be watching the Calgary Flames game, but you’ll have the instant updates for other NHL games, the NBA games, MLB, NFL, Tennis, Golf, whatever is on. If you click on one, you go to that channel to watch the game.

Also, accross the bottom, there’s a news ticker. It’ll scroll news that you’d see on Fox’s sports website. You can scroll down and click on it, and it’ll take you to the article within the Media Center interface. This is excellent since it doesn’t launch a browser so you can read it all from your couch using just the regular remote control.

Along with news stories that appear on the bottom, it’ll also have game highlight updates from other channels. Things like “Sidney Crosby Scores”. When you click on that, it takes you to the appropriate channel. If you’re paying attention, you’ll be on that channel before the televised replay. It’s an excellent feature.

Searching

My Motorola box also has searching, but it’s really an exercise in patience to use it. In Media Center, searching is easy. The numbers on your remote work like the numbers on a phone. Each number has about 3 letters. As you type, you get real-time results. So you can just type until you see the show you want, saving you the most amount of time possible. Excellent.

Searching allows you to look for shows and movies by a number of categories. Title, keyword, genre, actor, director. What’s neat is say you search for “Sean Connery”, not only to you get the movies he’s been in that are playing in the next 2 weeks, you get all the movies he’s ever been in. You’ll see all the cover art for all the movie boxes, which is much nicer than scrolling through a list of text. Now, seeing all the movies at once doesn’t sound very useful. Who cares if he was in “Dr. No” if it’s not going to be on. Well, Media Center allows you to mark shows that aren’t necessarily on in the next two week to record eventually when they are on. I believe this is a stupendous feature. I could program Media Center to record the world movie premiere of whatever movie when it eventually comes out. I don’t have to think about it.

Online Content

Now I haven’t clicked on all my options here yet, but I did find some excellent features. For instance, you can find other related videos to certain content on the web. So, in my case, I was able to find some post-game sports interviews to watch. They stream right off the web. Awesome.

Media Center Extender

I have an Xbox 360, which I’ve finally been able to use as a Media Center Extender. I didn’t know exactly what it was going to be like, especially since I’m running my 360 wirelessly now. If you look at the network connection on my Xbox, the wireless signal is only 3 out of 4 bars.

This, however, was enough for me to stream HD content (on an 802.11g wireless network) to my Xbox with no frame rate issues whatsoever. It was actually quite exciting that it worked so well.

You can stream live tv, recorded shows, pictures, and music to your extender. There are really only two limitations to this interface. You cannot stream DivX videos with the media center interface. You can play DivX videos on the actual computer in media center, or through the Xbox (but not in the media center extender mode).

The other limitation is that you can’t stream a movie from a DVD in your media center computer to your Media Center Extender. But the Xbox 360 has a DVD drive already, why would I care about this? Well, I was hoping that would work because then I’d go buy a Blu-Ray drive for the computer and I’d have Blu-Ray movies on my big screen. Unfortunately, I was not that lucky. So close!

In Conclusion

I’ve really only had my computer hooked up to the analog cable for a day now, and I’m already really impressed. I’m wishing I had another Media Center computer to hook up to my cable box and then eliminate the need to use the cable-box’s software. I’m also wishing that Canada would go cable card or something similar so that I could get my HD directly into my computer. It’s when I see the potential of things like this that I wish I lived in the US.

All in all, I’m going to be looking forward to getting a flatscreen TV and a comfortable couch/chair in my computer room.

My shiny (literally) new Dell XPS 720 with Windows Vista came yesterday. I got it all running pretty quick, and I’m quite happy with it so far, though I haven’t done too much with it yet. Here are my thoughts.

• The whole 32-bit 4Gb/3Gb RAM issue is rather annoying. Wish I had known about that one ahead of time…
• Who knew the lights of the machine can change colour? Sweet.
• My copy of Civ IV is too old to run on Vista, sigh.
• Company of Heroes is somehow under-rated.
• New Aero Glass interface is pretty slick, maybe too slick, not sure yet.
• A computer case as large as this one, makes a 24-inch widescreen seem kinda small. Maybe the box should go on the floor…
• I want to get a second 8800GT for a SLI configuration, just to see what kind of difference it would make.
• But wouldn’t that compound that stupid RAM issue?!

I know Vista’s not new, but what do other people think?

Also, on a slighly unrelated note… Who would’ve thought that an older linksys usb wireless adapter from 2004 would work flawlessly under Ubuntu for months, and then be totally unusable after 3 minutes on a Win XP machine that it used to work fine on.

Tags: Vista, Dell

Let me begin by stating that I have not used Windows Vista, and I have not seen it in person. All my assumptions are based on the screen shots of vista and on the design of Windows Media Player 11 for Windows XP.Now let me begin with a little background information.

There is a concept called Fitts’ Law. Basically it translates extremely well to computer GUI interfaces (graphical user interface, basically, using a mouse to click on icons etc). In simple terms, Fitts’ law shows that the difficulty to point a mouse pointer at a target is directly related to the distance the mouse pointer must first travel and the size of the target. Seems pretty obvious, I know. There is a mathematical formula to gauge this movement, but I’m not getting into that. Truth be told, you don’t need to be able to use the formula to make better designs with Fitts’ law in mind. Understanding how it works is more than enough.

You may have also noticed that when using a Windows, Macintosh, or a Linux machine, the mouse pointer cannot move outside of the boundaries of the screen. Go ahead and try, you’ll never get that last sliver of the pointer to leave the screen. Now together, Fitts’ Law and the inability to extend the pointer beyond the screen creates an excellent phenomenon. Essentially, the edges of the screen have infinite area.

Something that Apple Computer (now just Apple Inc.) did way back in the beginning of their GUI interface design, was patent the placement of the menu bar on the very top edge of the screen. This lends a HUGE usability advantage to Mac users. It is far easier to target a menu when it has infinite height.

Windows doesn’t have this advantage. But it don’t count it out yet. Windows places the “Close” button in the upper most right-hand corner of the screen. A user can close applications so quickly with the mouse by simply throwing it upwards and to the right. It has infinite width and height. It is much faster to do that than it is to aim right at the center of a little “X”.

Which brings me to the reason for this post. The button design in Windows Media Player 11 is slightly different from that of version 10. The button’s are done using the new Vista style. They are attached to the very top of the screen, but not the right hand side. There is a seven pixel gap.

Users (such as myself) continually fail to close the application because their brains are trained to heave the mouse to the top-right rapidly without regard. The button is less usable than it’s older version, despite being wider (which I believe Microsoft widened for this very reason).

This style of button is present on all Vista windows and programs, as far as I have seen. This is a huge loss of usability to the Windows Vista interface. I can’t and don’t understand why Microsoft would make critical design error, especially since they had already did something good. Of all the features that they’re “copying” from Mac OS X, you’d think they’d try not to give anything up.