>Music Services and Music Stores have been removed, and My
>Apps and App Gallery are in their place.
>
Having used this for a while now, I have useability issues with it.
1. Migration
It messed my menus up. Removed some things that I had put on the Home menu,
reordered other items.
2. Installing Apps
There's so many things that I infrequently use. So the first thing I have to
do is go through the whole of the App Gallery list selecting each one that I
may want to use and "install" it. I counted 24 items in the list that I needed
to install.
Having to install apps one at a time is really tedious, even on one player, let
alone repeating the process on all players.
When installing an App on a Boom, I get 12 lines of text; 10 lines of
instructions, fitted to the display width, followed by two lines of text that
don't fit, so have to wait for the text to scroll into view to read fully.
These are a choice - install with icon on home menu, install without icon on
home menu.
Perhaps one line of text that scrolls for these messages would be nicer, seeing
that the option lines are long and scroll?
Another example:
Choose to install, get 5 lines of text:
Deezer has been
successfully
installed!
Launch Deezer now ->
Go back to App Gallery ->
What's wrong with:
Deezer has been successfully installed!
Launch Deezer now ->
Go Back to App Gallery ->
Or just "Installed successfully".
"Go back to App Gallery" doesn't actually go back - it adds the App Gallery to
the menu stack, so when going through "installing" lots of Apps, you get a
rather deep menu, which isn't nice when you do try to go back through menus.
3. Useability
I don't like "My Apps". They are not my apps, especially since players are
shared amongst my family, so some will only be used by my wife (most are for
me). Most are not even "Apps". I think that the whole thing is so convoluted
and will I am sure confuse loads of people (especially existing customers).
So now I have an unstructured list in "My Apps" containing 24 things - some of
which I use all the time, some of which I will hardly ever use, but do access
occasionally (eg. finding new podcasts).
Once an app has been installed, I'd expect them to be removed from "App
Gallery". i.e. having installed most of the apps, I'd expect to see a very
small number of remaining apps left in App Gallery. I will not notice new apps
appearing in App Gallery, eg, a new radio station provider, because there are
so many in the list
It's not possible to structure things nicely. I didn't have any of these items
on my home menu before; they were much better integrated into the menus off of
the Home page - eg, Internet Radio, Extras, Music Services. I really miss this.
Setting up things for the Home menu was so much easier; scroll down a list of
things and choose which ones to display by selecting each one. Going through
the above process to get 24 things essentially moved from a structured list in
App Gallery into an unstructured list in My Apps is a right chore, with no real
benefit.
I have no concept of what is an app and what isn't. eg. some things have been
made "Apps", but others haven't. RSS Newsfeed has been, but Info Browser
hasn't. "Podcasts" (which is used to access podcast feeds) isn't an app, but
various podcast providers have been added as Apps. Some radio station
providers are integrated into "Internet Radio", whilst most are now apps.
So some things we are stuck with because they are not apps, and other things we
are forced to go through the rigmarole of installing, configuring, and then
hassle of finding before they can be used.
What about third-party plugins - can these be Apps? What about plugins that
currently integrate into menus, eg. Magnatune and SeeqPod plugins integrate
into Music Services, but this doesn't exist any more. How can I access them?
>Apps that have been set to appear on the home menu will appear between
>Internet Radio and My Apps.
What if the Home menu has been customised?
_______________________________________________
beta mailing list
beta@lists.slimdevices.com
http://lists.slimdevices.com/mailman/listinfo/beta
