[:haripu:]

hi all,

now for my rant: I have recentyl bought a new Core Duo iMac and one of the features that really sold me was front row. I always wanted to have a kind of media center for my living room. and the movie trailer feature, boy, that looked good. just the thing to impress your friends with.

after a few days of using it i got really frustrated with it. it just isn't ready for release. and don't tell me that it is just a version 1.x, because that is already out of beta stage (and it shouldn't be).

my main complaints:

- front row has the ability to completely bring down the system. after todays update i watched some movies and then did exit front row. and from that point on, my system was totally unresponsive, trying to trigger frontrow a-new from the remote didn't work. activity monitor (when it eventually cared to show up a few minutes later - this is a complaint about the sense of having an activity monitor that is never accessible when needed) showed me that the processes "loginwindow" and "rcd" were unresponsive. killing rcd kind of fixed it, but seconds later the dock froze on interaction and I finally decided to kill login-window (and log out by that means).
well the problem reappeared on the next try, and I FINALLY figured out it was iTunes(!) - although I have never launched it - sitting in the background and wainting for a f*ucking "OK" to acknowlege that it has just been updated and I have read the f*cking license agreement. Can you believe that? And Frontrow had no way of showing me that.

- movie trailers never work. I know for some of you they do. for some of you they did for a time (like for me). but until now Apple doesn't even acknowlegde that there is a problem with access to the movie trailers site and no amount of removing cached files and deleting preferences will fix that.

- exit an movie and you will have set it back to zero. if you have ever tried to watch a movie on frontrow and then interrupted to write an important email, you will know what I am talking about. as soon as you go back to the next level menu, frontrow resets the starting point to zero. and the fast forward feature is a joke. you can fast forward about 3 seconds in 1 second, which means if you have watched the first three quarters of an hour of a movie you have to hold down your thumb for 15 minutes to proceed. great interface design, guys.

- font sizes are far too large (or at least should be customizeable). Why don't the just make it a little smaller and use more that one line. I.E. if you have an mp3 (or video video or whatever )that is named "Album title - number - title.extension" you see "Album tit...". Just great. Maybe mp3s are a bad example because of course you can shorten that by using tags (although that will not help very much with some), but for movies there is no such app as iTunes that deals with the meta-date, so you HAVE these enormous titles.

- movies take ages to show up. if you have more than just a few movies in your movie folder something weird happens. I don't know what frontrow is doing but it takes its time. maybe it is checking the if the format of all movies can play with quicktime or whatever. but what it SHOULD be doing is make a list of all the movies in the folder and show it to the user (which would take about a second). maybe this has something to do with most codecs not being available for intel yet, but it is just soooo annoying. if it won't play tell me so when I try to access them, but don't stall that long for christ's sake.

...

and on and on.

I am really in no mood any longer to list all the shortcomings but I think the above should give you a good impression of what I am talking about.
Rereading it it seems that most of my complaints are connected to the video features. iTunes and iPhoto did quite OK for me. So obviously only a third of Frontrow really sucks.

[monkeybrain]

Have you tried the update Apple released yesterday? I hear it makes things quite a bit faster, although doesn't address most of your complaints (which I agree are quite valid).

It seems strange to me that a programme like Pages can get access to the iTunes library and iPhoto library without opening those programs, yet Frontrow needs to open them in the background. Maybe it should be called Frontend rather than Frontrow, because it seems more like an add-on.

Some way to browse photos, ala Finder/Preview/Spotlight slideshow feature would be nice too. Do people actually make albums of every roll they make?

Oh, about the Activity Viewer, it would have been easier to bring up the force-quit box (command-option-escape) as that also shows unresponsive programs in red. Come to think of it, I haven't had to use that once since I've been using Tiger...

[hotani]

I've been very happy with MediaCentral - and the movie trailers work very well. Still sucks with navigation; back and forth while watching a video is hit or miss, but this could be a QT problem since that is the engine they are using, or perhaps it is my 867 clock speed... yeah, that's probably it.

[moonmonkey]

The reason it opens iTunes is so that iTunes keeps playing music after you quit Front Row, that makes sense to me. I have no idea why it needs to open iPhoto.

[monkeybrain]

That does make sense and iTunes isn't so annoying since I (and probably most people) have it open most of the time anyway. But iPhoto is slow and a resource hog. They need to fix this, it really seems unpolished.

[monkeybrain]

-

[macintologist]

I've been noticing all those hiccups too. What the f&*k is apple thinking releasing such an unfinished product like that.

[kman42]

I dig it the most.