I took a look at the Media Center in Vista yesterday and while I like the idea of placing all of your media applications and libraries in a single spot, I think Microsoft really missed the boat on the design details. One thing I should mention is that the Media Center was actually taken from XP Media Center Edition and given a Vista update, but for the most part, these functions already existed prior to the release of Vista
Instead of providing a menu system or a drill-down type of design, the Media Center is organized along two axes in graphical view that just didn't work for me. You have to click left and right and up and down in what seems an almost random design. While I'm sure there is an organization to this system, I couldn't figure it out in my testing, and it shouldn't be a mystery. This design choice is even more baffling when you look at the XP Media Center Edition, which had a much more functional menu system.
What's more, I liked the idea of storing your media in organized libraries by music, video, TV content and digital pictures, but these libraries all work just a little bit differently leading me to believe that each was designed by a different programmer, and the project manager lacked the foresight to create a unified vision of the library design.
One thing I loved about the new picture library is the ability to tag pictures, thereby giving you the ability to organize the pictures into logical categories. The tagging implementation could use work, but with some tweaks it could be a great feature for users. Unfortunately, Microsoft didn't bother to apply the tagging functionality to the other libraries where, as I see it, they could be just as useful.
The Media Center is certainly a good idea, but it still needs a lot of work to be both unified and usable.
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