RE: MainLobby Ver 2.0

["Paul Gordon" <paul_gordon@xxxxxxx>]

I've downloaded the trial versions, and have spent a number of hours
playing 
with it today. (slow day...)

So far my opinions are as follows:

It is incredibly frustrating and enfuriating to use...

The development UI does not adhere to any usability guidelines whatsoever.
It uses custom dialog boxes with non-standard tool icons which are not 
explained anywhere in the documentation, and nothing in the UI has
tooltips. 
Basically, the only way to find out what something does is to click it
& 
see....

It has some *really* stupid behaviour, like: It will never warn you about
saving a modified file, it will blithely let you close the file (which can
sometimes happen in unexpected ways), and lose all your hard work. It has
no 
"undo" functionality at all. It will not allow you to pick an
element to 
delete from the interface, so if you have setup a screen with 20 buttons
on, 
and you want to delete button number 3, then the ONLY way to do this is to
delete button 20, then 19, then 18, etc.... all the way back to button 3,
you'd then have to manually add all those buttons back in again...

On my test machine (XP Pro on my laptop) it very often does "odd"
things on 
the screen, like for instance when displaying the button library, it 
overlays the text labels that should be behind the browse window all over
the screen... when changing through the library pages more and more text
will appear... sometimes it will disappear as well, sometimes text appears
on top of other text (multiple times) and so on... - This seems to only
happen in edit mode, so in actual use the screens appear to work OK.

There are some other quirks about adding buttons.. for instance, some 
buttons do not actually have *any* graphic presence at all *until* you have
assigned a text label to it - this especially applies to buttons designed
to 
have a "mouseover" effect. This means that when adding certain
buttons to 
your screen, you can't actually see anything! - inevitably leading to the
repeated pressing of the "Add" button to try & make a new
button appear... 
Of course you then end up with *Loads* of superfluous (& invisible)
buttons 
on the screen, which jump out at you as soon as you move a mouse pointer
over it....


All that aside, when you discover, and learn to avoid/workaround the 
abovementioned shortcomings, it is possible to produce a good-looking 
Media-Centre or Tivo-like interface which will look good on a TV, quicker
than with any other piece of software I have seen, and that alone makes it
worth persevering with in my opinion.

All in all, I would say that it is currently a very rough piece of
software. 
It has the feel of an unfinished product about it, or of a very amateurish
piece of shareware. However, when I have asked in the past (on list) for
suggestions for something to build a simple TV Interface ala Tivo et al,
the 
resulting suggestions have been for the most part, much more complicated
and/or more expensive, being mostly complete shell replacements for
Windows. 
This is NOT a shell replacement, it is a simple app that runs on top of,
not 
instead of, the standard Windows desktop, which in my opinion is the 
prefereable approach for what I want to achieve with this type of
software.

I give it 6 out of 10 as it stands currently, and I will be persevering
with 
it for a bit longer to see if I can improve upon that score...

HTH

Paul G.



Date: Thu, 16 Jan 2003 15:44:52 -0000
>
>Looks really nice.
>
>
>
>Anyone here using it?
>
>
>
>Can I use it to interface to HV, ACE etc?
>

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