Comments on: Sony: Leaders in Stupid Software Design & User Experience

By: Andy - HDMI Switches

Andy - HDMI Switches — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 20:37:37 +0000

That’s technology for you. It is usually the biggest manufacturers and developers who tend to go the long way round during development, and end up creating platforms that seem utter nonesense. In my experience, whatever you plan on buying, is best researched first on the net to avoid situations or find solutions.

Andy

By: Adonis

Adonis — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 10:19:04 +0000

It seems like Sony (and others) need to read: Taming HAL

http://product.half.ebay.com/_W0QQprZ5901393QQcpidZ1189828486

Great read about Human Computer Interfaces, from the serious side of the field: NASA and flight controls! (but, yes!, it talks about annoying interfaces of TVs and clocks, etc)

By: Lippy

Lippy — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 20:23:54 +0000

Hey BBlum!
(you may remember me from the tequila Forum) Nice to learn we have the same tastes in TVs as tequila. I bought the XBR2 (piano black) in April and also have it hooked up to my Mac-mini (which I primarily use as a music server).

That “PC menu-thing” has ALWAYS driven me batty. The only way I’ve found to back out of the PC menu is to hit the “ANT” button on the remote. This takes me to a full screen whitenoise image and from there I can hit the “menu” button on the remote and get back to the “external imputs” menu.

Without turning this discussion into a Sony Manual replacement… um, what’s the way YOU’re getting back to the “external inputs” menu if you’re in the PC mode?

Thanks!

-Lip

By: dirkstoop

dirkstoop — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 18:29:48 +0000

Strangely enough they do seem to get UI right in their car stereos. I recently got one and am still surprised about the many small UI details they got right. (hopefully not just because i got the cheapest/simplest one with a front aux port..)

e.g.: the primary control is a dial with discrete ticks, which you can press to loop through some audio settings (EQ/balance/etc.). If you keep it depressed for a while you go to a prefs menu, the settings presented one at a time. There’s a ton of ‘on/off’ options in there, twisting the dial clockwise turns them on, CCW turns them off. Sounds very obvious so far..

However, most car stereo’s I’ve used with similar discreet step dials actually flip boolean settings every time you hit the next notch, meaning two tick to the right would switch something on and then off again, really frustrating to deal with while driving. There’s a ton more of very well designed little interaction details in that thing, certainly didn’t expect that from sony when i bought it.. so it seems there’s still some hope left for their ID department.. — maybe from the interns who’re put to work on low-end products

A shame they fail designing the (G)UI for something that can actually show more than one line of text at a time..

By: bbum

bbum — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 07:34:27 +0000

Thanks, Michael!

It appears that the open source bits for the TV are not on the page I linked, but on a different page called linux @ sony.com: http://sony.com/linux/

Go figure.

Anyway, the TVs do seem to have the ability to self update as Michael described. But I haven’t found any evidence that anyone has tried to write custom software for said TV. Not that I’m particularly tempted to go there, but it seems like an intriguing hacking platform — has USB, many video inputs, gorgeous display, can switch audio, etc…

Anyone?

By: Alderete

Alderete — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 07:20:56 +0000

Oops, I wasn’t clear: there’s a USB port on the TV, which normally is used for showing photos and the like. But if you stick in the updater, the TV runs it, apparently. I haven’t done it, I didn’t have the issues that were described, which had to do with uneven backlighting. You can read more on the Sony eSupport site, http://esupport.sony.com/.

By: Alderete

Alderete — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 07:12:41 +0000

I have a similar model Sony (smaller screen), and IIRC, you can get Sony to send you a USB stick drive with an updater on it, for a couple of specific issues. So I believe that that is the official update mechanism.

By: bbum

bbum — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 17:36:18 +0000

Yes — to be absolutely clear: I have an Apple TV and it looks absolutely stunning over HDMI at 720p. Perfect. I use it mostly for music playback while a slide show is running. Never fails to impress.

By: Ken Anderson

Ken Anderson — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 11:13:04 +0000

To Ryan Brown:
The issue Bill raises is with the DVI output of a computer… Apple TV has HDMI and component outputs that would not be subject to the same issues.

Ken

By: Vivek G

Vivek G — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 02:13:31 +0000

I agree with the whole thing about confusing UI’s, the Sharp Aquos (LC-52D64U) has similar weird issues. You have to be in the tuner input to have the menus that let you look and see what version of software is installed in the the thing (no real reason it couldn’t have been included in the other inputs for the main menu of the tv). Also, this tv doesn’t allow you to skip the tuner either. The other interesting thing they do is that from HDMI it automatically picks up the label of the component connected to it (PS3 and Motorola fios tv box), but it doesn’t keep those labels when the components are off they go back to the generic names. And why in this day and age I have to pick from a menu of 12 choices for names for my inputs and not be able to give a real meaningful name just doesn’t make sense. The one nice thing is that the tv includes and rs-232 interface in the back so I can bypass a lot of the UI and control it from my mac mini (once I get a bit of time to work on it)!