Kind of Blue
userinterface
I bought one of these Digifusion (who?) hard disk recorders last week. Mine is an 80GB version. It does more or less what it says on the tin, apart from the "chase record" feature (where you start watching something you're recording while it's still recording), which doesn't work so far. Still, it's got 2 FreeView tuners, which means I no longer have issues about being able to tape digital channels, which was the main reason for buying it.
It pauses live tv etc, and the quality of actual recordings (on SP rather than any of the compressed extended play options) is indistinguishable from the original broadcast. The main benefit over VHS, apart from picture quality, is the sound quality, also excellent.
So I'm mostly pleased with it - I'm now able to record obscure-but-quite-good shows from Freeview channels, like abc1 (sports night, the geena davis show, mad about you, 8 simple rules for dating my teenage daughter), itv2 (3rd rock from the sun) and itv3 (the practice, hack, crossing jordan).
But that's not why I'm writing this. No, I wanted to comment on the interface of the thing, which is horrible. One of the reasons I tend to buy Sony over, say, Philips, is the user interface. Digifusion get theirs very wrong indeed.
It's blue. With white writing. Only it's not even a plain blue. It's like some kind of garish, sappy, Windows desktop background. And it reminded me, obviously, how often it is that interface designers confuse the concept of "user friendly" with "bright and garish colour schemes." Look at the evidence. Windows - overwhelmingly blue. Even (gasp) OS X - mostly blue by default (or "Aqua", but who are they kidding?). Quite often the on-screen VCR programming interface is - dammit - blue, as well.
So, boo to blue, back to school, people, and learn all about human interfaces. Again.
Beyond the blue, it does crappy things like opening confirmation dialogues which are exactly the same colour (and background) as the interface in the background. So you often don't notice that you're being asked to confirm something. Bonkers.
I bought one of these Digifusion (who?) hard disk recorders last week. Mine is an 80GB version. It does more or less what it says on the tin, apart from the "chase record" feature (where you start watching something you're recording while it's still recording), which doesn't work so far. Still, it's got 2 FreeView tuners, which means I no longer have issues about being able to tape digital channels, which was the main reason for buying it.
It pauses live tv etc, and the quality of actual recordings (on SP rather than any of the compressed extended play options) is indistinguishable from the original broadcast. The main benefit over VHS, apart from picture quality, is the sound quality, also excellent.
So I'm mostly pleased with it - I'm now able to record obscure-but-quite-good shows from Freeview channels, like abc1 (sports night, the geena davis show, mad about you, 8 simple rules for dating my teenage daughter), itv2 (3rd rock from the sun) and itv3 (the practice, hack, crossing jordan).
But that's not why I'm writing this. No, I wanted to comment on the interface of the thing, which is horrible. One of the reasons I tend to buy Sony over, say, Philips, is the user interface. Digifusion get theirs very wrong indeed.
It's blue. With white writing. Only it's not even a plain blue. It's like some kind of garish, sappy, Windows desktop background. And it reminded me, obviously, how often it is that interface designers confuse the concept of "user friendly" with "bright and garish colour schemes." Look at the evidence. Windows - overwhelmingly blue. Even (gasp) OS X - mostly blue by default (or "Aqua", but who are they kidding?). Quite often the on-screen VCR programming interface is - dammit - blue, as well.
So, boo to blue, back to school, people, and learn all about human interfaces. Again.
Beyond the blue, it does crappy things like opening confirmation dialogues which are exactly the same colour (and background) as the interface in the background. So you often don't notice that you're being asked to confirm something. Bonkers.
posted by Anonymous at
Monday, January 24, 2005
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