The Michigan Telephone blog

To me, the most infuriating thing about using a program like XBMC is that, at least in my preferred skin (Alaska Revisited) the authors of various add-ons (or maybe the skin author? I honestly don’t know who’s at fault here) seem to want to do everything possible to hide program information from you until you click a button. So, you are scrolling through a list of titles, and you can’t even see the full title if it’s more than a few words long, because these folks have apparently never heard of word-wrap – instead they go with a ssssslllllooooowwwww horizontal scroll (only on the selected item). And then to see the description — assuming there even is one — you have to click the “info” button on each individual title (and then click it again to close the info window, and I have no idea how you get to this if you’re not using a remote). So you can’t just scroll through titles and, as you hit each one, see a description on another part of the screen. They can show us a freaking thumbnail and/or artwork for each title, which often tells us very little about the show, but to get a description you have to do extra clicks. What is it with these guys, do they enjoy click-click-clicking needlessly? Do they think we can all intuit what a program is about from the artwork?

What's with the horizontal scroll of lengthy titles? And, where's the description? But hey, at least it's showing us a thumbnail frame! Maybe we can figure out what it's about from that… No, I don't think so. This is so useless!

Now, perhaps there is some mode that will display the title information as you scroll past (much as is done with the thumbnail) but if there is, I haven’t discovered how to turn it on. Which is another problem unto itself – it’s very obvious to me that the XBMC folks (by which I mean, whoever’s responsible for this problem) have never done any serious usability testing with regular users. Settings tend to be hidden all over the place — there might be a way to fix this, but if there is (which I rather doubt), good luck finding it.  Why all the skin-related settings are not in the settings menu I will never know (then again, as I say, I don’t know if the problem is with the skin or the add-on, or a combination of both).  In any case, this is REALLY poor design, in my opinion.

But there is one other issue, and that is that there’s no such thing as a program guide that spans add-ons, in either XBMC or Boxee (they’re called apps in Boxee, but it’s basically the same thing). You have to tediously look through each add-on to see if something you want to watch might be in there. So if I want to view something in a particular genre, or actually search for a particular title, I have to look through each app. There is no way to discover programs I might like if they are in add-ons or apps I wouldn’t normally look through. If you already know where a particular title is, it’s not a problem, but if you want to see a list of (for example) all science fiction titles available in all apps, you are just out of luck.

Nor is there a way to flag a title and have it alert you when a new episode is available (that I can find) in either XBMC or Boxee. Granted that this might not be practical for some add-ons that are associated with very high traffic sites (like YouTube) but for others, particular those that offer episodes of TV shows, it would be great to get notifications when new shows are available, and an easy way to select them without searching through a bunch of apps.

One thing people like about cable or satellite services is there is a guide that scrolls along and lets you see what’s about to come on. I understand that the concept of time is much different in a program like XBMC or Boxee (although many titles are only available for a limited time) but still, I think most users would appreciate the convenience of a guide that shows titles available within various criteria, such as genre or age of title. The most important thing is that (at least short) descriptions be easily available, preferably without extra clicking. If vertical scrolling is used (please, NO horizontal scrolling!) it would also be great if the scroll speed were adjustable (I’m a fast reader, so slow scrolling irritates me no end).

C’mon, people, pretend that non-techies are using this stuff (because they will be) and that they don’t want to do a whole bunch of extra clicking to see descriptions. And beyond that, please give us some kind of guide that spans all add-ons, apps, plug-ins, or whatever you call them!