Way back when, I found Media Jukebox and Media Center and it became my go-to app for managing music ripped from my CDs, including transferring to my listening devices. Then I got an iPhone, and the only app that managed apps was iTunes, so I abandoned MC. Now iTunes no longer manages apps, so it occurred to me to give MC another spin. And the fact that there's now also a Mac version means, theoretically, I could have my libraries on multiple computers.
So I downloaded the latest MC/Mac and started it up. My initial impressions were not good. So I wanted to give my feedback to the MC team in hopes of improvement.
First, because it was what I had available, I installed on a MacBook. 12" screen. And when I opened MC for the first time, my first thought was that the UI library JRiver chose to use just wastes a whole lot of screen real estate. There is a big wide band across the top that is mostly bereft of content. One of the things I liked about (much) older versions of MC was that it used screen real estate very efficiently. This is, apparently, no longer the case. And the important stuff is the content. It kind of looks like many apps that try to be "web like" and so have thick bounding boxes around every screen element. And while it is important to allow screen elements to "breathe," it's not a good design decisions to have them swimming in oceans of whitespace.
Then, I noticed a countdown in the lower left, something about automatically importing media. This is just a terrible product decision. Asking if you want media imported automatically is one thing (and the proper thing), but just doing it automatically is not how you treat your users. Even if you assume users would notice the countdown in the lower left (normally an out-of-the-way spot in a user interface), you just don't take control away from users like that. (Apologists at this point will chime in and say it's easy to stop this from happening, missing the point altogether.)
Finally, I did the one thing I often do when installing a new program: Go look at the settings to see what I can configure. In this case, I did nothing. Yet I was asked if I wanted to save changes. I'd guess that some programmer has some code that just the act of looking at the settings dialog makes some data somewhere "dirty," and so the code to save changes gets called automatically when that happens. That this sort of basic thing wasn't caught in testing before release does not give a good impression of the quality of the codebase. One other thing: the check box offering to save the decision made here this first time is just plain wrong. You definitely do not want a "Save" choice stored because the very next time you could make a wrong choice and want to cancel out, and your saved default I'd guess doesn't allow that. (Or maybe that check box just defines which choice gets the focus, so that's what's used if users press Enter instead of clicking with the mouse. But even that's a strange user experience; it's sort of like the custom menus Microsoft once tried with its Office apps that created inconsistency where users ended up with different results when appearing to do the same thing.)
It'll be interesting to see if MC/Win has these same issues, in which case I'm not sure I'd want to dump iTunes, as bloated and bad as it is, and return to MC as my media management app.
