I’m going to struggle to explain this as it is very visual so bear with me…
Bugs me to no end how TV and other remote controls and the device they control cannot get on the same page consistently. I’m talking specifically about the channel buttons. On your remote; typically two arrows, one “up”, one “down”.
Does “up” mean “higher numbers”? Or does “up” mean “browsing upwards” in a menu? Let’s find out…
In my current cable TV scenario and in most I’ve used it works both ways paradoxically. When I’m watching TV full-screen, the “up” button goes to higher numbered channels. Well and good. But when I’m bringing up the guide feature which brings up a menu and puts the TV in a small corner window the “up” button surfs upwards on the menu. And the menu, of course, displays channels top down meaning from top to bottom the channels are now arranged from lowest to highest.
Would it have killed anyone to have the guide be in line with the channel up/down and display channels moving higher from the bottom up?
More to the nerd-rage point, why the fuck does this bother me so much?!?
I’ve had very similar thoughts go through my head a few times while using my cable remote. I try to voice it to my wife but she just rolls her eyes at me.
Do you really use the same up and down buttons regardless of the context? You don’t have separate channel up & down buttons along with up and down arrow navigation buttons?
Sure, I guess some remotes do have a separate up/down navigation button. But it is still logically inconsistent to me… if “up” means a higher numbered channel over here then I want “up” on the navigation button to go to a higher numbered channel and not “up” the graphic menu.
I wonder now if the people who programmed the original navigational menus gave it any thought or just did it the way they did it and everything else after has followed their lead. Or maybe they did research it, bring in some testers, ask them whether they preferred it this way or that.
I have no true justification for my rage at this but it honestly bugs me every time… “up” should note an increase the way we intuit it on the channel surfing buttons. Having an option to bring up an onscreen menu such as the channel or programming guide is great, don’t get me wrong. But turn the menu around so it goes up from lower to higher channels!
This is what was so great about Tivo. They had the best UI for watching and recording TV. I gave them up when DVRs became the norm with Comcast, but none of the software I use from cable companies is very good. It’s the type of software you immediately uninstall as soon as you get a computer from Dell or some other manufacturer.
The GIMP is a wonderful tool. So many thanks to those who have made it available for free.
The interface, while leagues above what it was in years past, is still best described as “what happens when an infinite number of wierdo open-source beards for whom vi is the pinnacle of UX bang on an infinite number of workstations until the minimum human-usable interface appears out of the chaos.”
I love ragers who cry about a sniper camping … without taking into account the fact that, by it’s very function in war, a sniper is meant to camp. Their tears fuel my nerdgasms.
Was at a client’s doing some IT work recently and they offered me some boxes filled with old cables and apparatus. Right on top I see a Centronix cable. I declared in my best Indiana Jones “These belong in a museum!”
This goes back about 10-15 years, but when I was hired on for client support for a software company, the department had a framed photograph of one of their more infamous customers. They had given him instructions to send a screenshot next time he saw an error/problem he was complaining about, so that we could get all the details (it was something we hadn’t seen in-house, apparently). In any case, two weeks later they get a letter from this customer and in it are multiple photographs of his computer screens. The bonus was that the camera was fairly far back, enough to capture his entire desk, so that you couldn’t possibly make out anything on his screen.
Needless to say, it didn’t help them diagnose the problem.
Infinity’s X1 is a huge improvement over the earlier Comcast UI for the DVR and everything else. Takes some getting used to, and is far from perfect, but man, it’s so much better.
We get clients who print out the entire screen, circle and make annotations of changes/errors, SCAN the image back onto the PC (in black and white, at something like 12 dpi), finally emailing us a word document with the image inside…
Maybe…and really this is just maybe, a nerd somewhere concerned about the falling IQ levels of the general population, decided to do their bit to fight against this slide? Like say Mr and Mrs Couch Potatoe are at home watching Fox News 24/7 as normal, having this function reversed stops their complete degeneration into slavering (fascist) GOP Trump supporters, or atleast slows it down. They HAVE TO use their brains when watching TV to work out how to navigate menu’s etc? Maybe? Annoying for the rest of us, but maybe saving humanity as a whole?
