Joost (at last)

I've been fiddling around with Joost a couple times now. First of all: The image quality is surprisingly good. The number of shows quite overwhelming. This leads to the first user experience challenge: How to organize this enormous amount of "channels"? This is done surprisingly easy with a left hand navigation of categories. Clicking each category lists the channels within the category in an explorer kind of view with thumb nails. Works pretty well.

There is also a control panel which pops up when you mouse over it. A few of the icons are hard to understand, but most of them are pretty straigth forward what you're used to from other players. They all have mouse-over text to help you along, so no worries there.

The only thing that is so-so is the content. They even have my cycling.tv in a much easier to use way than the original (see earlier post). Unfortunately since it is free (which is nice) they only show content that's fairly outdated. If they could provide a payment scheme I'd be more than happy to fork over my £25 that I paid to cycling.tv to them. I even log in to Joost so it shouldn't be that much of a problem to handle.

Joost really delivers a refreshing view on how you can design user interfaces running on Windows. If you're just a bit interested in interface design I really urge you to try it out. (It's a beta and crashes from time to time - but it's worth a go anyway)