Skidoo,
What do you or your wife find difficult?
I don't find any of it difficult. Quite the contrary. But I'm a software engineer and uber-nerd. My wife's not. Neither is my six (nearly seven) year old. But both can operate a CD changer with no problems. Media Center is another story.
Specifically, here are a few issues:
1. Our remotes work fine in mega-me. Not so in hairstyle. At least not as easily. That is, you can use the mouse cursor buttons on the remote to (tediously) drive the mouse pointer around the screen and click, but this is slow and requires patience and a level of precision neither really possess, at least in this context.
2. That having been said, the tree (in mega-me) is way too small and complex for them. They'd love to be able to scroll through lists of playlists and select one. And then of course be able to pause, advance, etc. That's it. Anything else blows their minds.
3. A crucial element of this playlist navigation and selection is the ability to go backwards and forwards through the screens with ease. In the current hairstyle the back and forward buttons are tiny and shoved in the lower left corner, so even if we resort to mousing with the remote, it's extra painful to perform these basic maneuvers.
Here's my ideal hairstyle skin:
1. Big clear buttons:
Audio->[Playlist Category]->[Playlist]
Video->[Playlist Category]->[Playlist]
Images->[Playlist Category]->[Playlist]
And prominent back and forward buttons.
2. Five-way remote button support. E.g. up, down, left, right, OK. Just like in mega-me.
3. Sexiness. Like now. It looks nice now. It's just not very functional, for my uses. But sex appeal is important.
4. Visualizations from Hairstyle. The little PIP window thing in the lower left is kind of useless to me. I need full screen vizes to come on automajically. To prevent burn-in on my plasma screens. This should also temporarily disable any regular screen savers, like my ATI TV app does now. It's annoying to be listening to tunes and have aquarium bubbles all of a sudden start gurgling loudly in the background
.
Hairstyle tweaked to meet these requirements would be like a little Holy Grail for me. It would make my life easier, and I wouldn't get quite so many sideways looks from The Boss when I want to implement some new gizmo or gadget
. Right now there's always a dialog surrounding music playback that goes something like this:
H: "I want to put on some music."
Me: "OK, do this, and this, and then this, and then click here...."
H: "Can you just put it on for me?"
Me: "OK." [Click, click, click, click, ...]
The notion of picking up a mouse in a den or rec room is anathema to her. Especially to do something as simple as play some tunes.
We're both huge music fans (she maybe even more than me), and we've been almost exclusively MP3 for years, but as a result of the (relatively) complex requisite software I have become the house DJ. I'd rather be just "House Playlist Compiler."
I think with hairstyle Media Center is poised to provide a bridge between the two essential sides of working with a personal music collection: library management and convenient playback. I don't know of anyone who has really built that ship yet.