90 percent of everything : Usability Blog

Written by Harry Brignull

Dear Microsoft,

Sorry to not write directly but you don’t seem to have any address to send bug reports to.

I’ve been using Vista on my telly as a Media Center for a few weeks now and there are some really obvious bugs you might like to fix. I’d love you to let me know whether you already know about these but you don’t seem to want to share that information so I’ll have to assume you don’t.

1. The music library is still really slow if you’ve got a large music collection and really really slow if you have a large music collection shared over a LAN. Like – so slow you’d think your machine had locked up.

2. Seeing as Vista Media Center is meant to run on a TV at TV resolutions do you think you could get rid of that annoying ‘there is not enough room to display your start menu’ when I am running it on a TV?

3. There is no way to list browse videos by name. So I just get a screen full of black squares as my videos all start with a fade in from black.

(By the way what are videos doing in the same category is pictures rather than with TV or movies?)

4. Shuffled playlists seems to contain big chunks of repeated items.

(Oh please let me browse my music by folder! Please! My tags are a mess.)

5. Skipping tracks too fast keeps throwing up ‘an unknown audio error has occurred’

I’ll let you know what else I find. Thanks for being so interested!

regards,

Andy

PS I’ve found a horrific data loss bug in Windows Mobile but seeing as it’s been there for three versions now I think you probably know about it. Shame it killed a bunch of my files

Do you remember when you stopped paying per minute for your dial-up modem connection? Suddenly using the web became a real part of your life rather than something you occasionally “dipped” into with one eye on the clock.

If you look at the mobile web, the situation is all still very early ‘90s. Up until recently mobile users in the UK were paying over £2 per megabyte downloaded (often much more). But now we have some promising developments:

• £5 / month for 1Gb data transfer on Three UK ["X-series Unlimited"]
• £7.50 / month for “unlimited” data transfer on T-mobile ["Web’n’walk"]

Now it’s not cheap yet, but it’s starting to make sense for normal consumers to use the mobile web a lot. What’s bizarre is that other mobile operators in the UK are still trailing behind madly. On O2 it’s £5 to buy 4 megs of data, which they expect to last you a whole month!