I agree with both of you, here is my IMHO:
I’m not saying that MC’s Theatre View is not for living room. But there are users and users, and living rooms and living rooms. While I could use MC’s TV in my living room, if I had to, I would prefer something like I described in the above document, which to my happy surprise was more glamorously implemented by Apple in their new TV device. The rest of my family has even more pronounced feelings in that direction. Neither do I say that the current MC’s TV should be replaced by something else – only that I would prefer something else in addition to existing ones. While I’m a computer and software development specialist and have been working with and using computer UIs for decades, and for almost everything today, in my living room I do prefer much more comfortable UI and environment. In my opinion MC’s TV is not there yet. Apple’s, and the prototype that I described in my document albeit simpler and less elaborate artistically, is.
There are few principles that make such an UI simple, comfortable, and yet informative.
1. No keyboard, no mouse, only a normal remote control device.
2. I’m sitting 3 – 5 meters from the box and the screen.
3. I don’t have an eagle’s eyes; my fingers shake or slip sometimes.
4. Sometimes I’m not even entirely sober.
5. I need to select a group of records (by genre, artist, album, playlist etc) and then be able to browse through that group’s artists, albums and tracks.
6. It is the cover image that gives me the feeling of an album. In fact, for me, the cover image is the album. Therefore the images are most important.
7. I want to be able to read the text on the cover from my distance and see all the details so that I can enjoy the artwork while listening and browsing, which means that the image must be large enough. On a normal TV screen there is real estate enough for only one such big image beside a list to browse through.
8. I want to see what is being played and still want to be able to browse, and at the same time see where I’m in browsing.
9. Very large text and pictures everywhere are required so that I don’t have to put my reading glasses on because I don’t use them when watching TV, movies, and listening to music in my living room. Reading glasses don’t work from that distance.
10. While browsing I want to see Artist, Album, Name and Year together with Cover Image and still have browse list visible.
11. No editing, no settings, no updating, no creating new items is required at all. That I do using the usual UI on the computer on my desk. Read-only only.
I created a prototype described in the document above because I couldn’t find a ready-to-use application with the above properties. I don’t think I will have the time and patience to program all the details that would be required in order to use it for real.
I’m using MC for maintaining my media library and for distributing the music to portable devices. MC is the best of all applications for this purpose on the market right now, especially when your library isn’t small and you have some advanced needs, which you will have if the library is large. Therefore the most natural thing would be to have the above UI implemented in MC.
At the same time, to my delight, Apple has produced an UI that, while not perfect, comes close enough. Would it be impossible to get this kind of UI in MC then I would have to resort to using Apple’s device running against an ALAC copy of my FLAC MC library. I would be much happier by using MC directly.
Thanks/Mikael
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Topic: Theatre View for the living room ideas. (Read 1003 times)