Joe Dombrowski

It’s not even particularly good looking :/

This is just the worst thing.

I don’t know where I’d go. I’ve used both Firefox and Chrome at times, but never feels right except Opera.

I used to work at Big Huge Games in 2008-2009, as an audio designer. I knew most of the Baltimore based team that got laid off today, and consider them all to be good friends, though I haven’t seen most in over two years. It’s such a sad day today, that despite the success of KoA both critically and in the market, the poor financial decisions beyond BHG’s control ended this for everyone.

On the bright side, we now have a complete team, including some of the original founders of BHG looking for jobs. They’ve started a game company before…

I generally don’t play the “fixed it” card, but in my experience…

Seagate = Unreliable hard drives, but rubbish enclosures.
LaCie = Unreliable hard drives, awesome enclosures.

I used to swear by the Samsung SpinPoint line of drives, and still have many running in my house. However, all the recent ones I’ve purchased (since the Seagate acquisition) have had more issues and shorter lifespans. I just don’t trust what Seagate does with their hard drive manufacturing…

Yeah, Fry’s doesn’t do a lot better in the employee department, but they beat the pants off Best Buy in selection and pricing. I still have reason to go to Fry’s. Best Buy is a different story…

Odd, I only have 1 mechanical drive in this computer (My server is another story), but it still boots in under 10 seconds…

Yeah, I’m not using my media PC right now, but when I move again and decide to give it another go, I’m probably going to sell all my tuners and buy a Ceton cablecard one. As painful as CableCard can be to set up, at least it’s only a single tuner and no set top boxes. It will be a significantly simpler setup.

I hate to be the guy that keeps complaining about Zune, but… Zune won’t download it, complaining that the video format is not supported.

It looks a lot like JW Player, which is one of the major ones in the market. It is flash primarily, because it needs to be to do adaptive quality switching, but it has HTML5 fallback.

Not sure what exactly changed betweeen the CP and now, but My UEFI bios based Windows 8 system with a Vertex 3 SSD does, in fact boot in under 10 seconds, but it also leaves plenty of time to spam the delete key and get into BIOS.

I have 2 Avermedia tuners that are ina drawer because their drivers caused constant blue-screens. Hauppauge drivers do, indeed, suck, but I’ve had just as many problems with the other guys.

To tell you the truth, I couldn’t name a single feature that ME introduced. I mean, I’m sure they added something, but I have no clue what it was. I only used it through proxy on a friend’s computer (he was living with me at the time)

I’m about a month using W8 fully, on both my laptop and desktop. I see what you mean, but I see the previews as the desktop version of the multitasking on WP7, which does use thumbnails, rather than an Aero thing. In fact, I think it would greatly improve things if Aero Peek were added to the multitasking bar.

My dad had an iPhone for over a year. He used it to make calls and occasionally text. As simple as the iPhone was, it still had enough barriers that he didn’t use it. I’m not saying those barriers are in use difficulty, but the busy interface of iOS didn’t seem inviting.

Now that I switched him over to WP7 (an HTC Titan), he uses pretty much every feature he has. Something about Metro design just begs to be used. It’s fun to use, and it’s intuitive. All the little details on it are there for a reason. Whether it’s the use of white space to make the design look clean and modern, or the way the arrow bounces right when you get to the bottom of the screen to say “There’s more over here!”

The way that text and images peek out from the right side of metro apps says that there’s another page to look at. A lot of people have given Microsoft crap about their lack of attention to detail, but if you dive deeper into Metro, it’s clear that just about everything has been considered.

Well, there’s no way to fit all that stuff on a single tile, and still have it be touch friendly. However, every one of those suggestions individually is already possible, and I have apps that do similar things.

It’s up to the devs to implement it, but facebook could easily let you pin a messaging tile that shows the number of people online (wouldn’t be in realtime, though, because most people want their phone to last more than an hour or two on a charge). Tapping it would go to messages. That’s basic functionality in WP7.5 development.

As far as showing notifications, that can be done too. Nearly all the apps that I use with notifications do this, including Carbon, which gives you a live-tile notification whenever you get a mention or DM.

My foursquare app has a tile pinned just for checking in, so it’s really just a matter of 3 taps to do that (open, select where you are, tap check in).

I said above that being able to add basic controls to the tile (maybe allow 2 or 3 vertically stacked sections) like play/pause music, or being able to go to a specific part of the app would be a neat feature, but I totally disagree with all the other suggestions:

1. Static tiles are a waste of space: Agree, but the solution is to not pin static tiles until the dev gives them live tile functionality, not to make the targets for “5-6” different ones silly small.

2 and 3. Resizable tiles: The tile size was picked by a professional designer so that with 2 side by side, and with 4 vertically visible, they follow the golden ratio and rule of thirds (so the image hendrikjumal posted below). White-space, or negative space, is an important concept in design. While some see it as “wasted space”, it is one of the defining characteristics of metro design.

5. A second major tenet of Metro design is typography. Tiles and typography. Therefore, the main screen, divided into two parts, uses tiles on one part, and typography on the other in order to clearly define where you are on the OS. It’s all about never having to think about where you are, and what you’re doing, and it’s what makes using WP7 so fast once you’re used to the conventions. Allowing large icons (I assume you mean a second screen of tiles) would confuse this idea, and the user would have to actively consider if they were on the start screen or the app list. Showing details would simply muddy the design, and is totally against the design language. As for sorting by size: Why? It makes sense for files in a full filesystem like on Windows, but for apps, it doesn’t. Who cares if Carbon is slightly bigger than Facebook or whatever? I will posit one thing I think would be a good idea: allow sorting by category. However, even this is problematic. Now, you can click a letter, and get a quick select to jump to any letter. With multiple forms of sorting (category, and then alphabetically in each category)
, which would you display here? It would either be another list of categories, or it would be the same, but unable to show you all of the apps that begin with a particular letter.

I’m sure you notice a trend here. Design, design, design. Microsoft wants to have a consistent, modern, and great design language across all their devices. Even in the name of minor functionality improvements, undermining the basic principles of their chosen design language can only hurt them.

I don’t think it looks glitchy at all. In fact, the look is identical to the multitasking corner at the top left, and is definitely consistent with with Metro.

Having it only on the charms bar is, in my opinion, a terrible idea. It means that to open the start screen (ignoring the keyboard) you have to move to a corner on the right, move the mouse up or down to open the menu, target something on the center of the screen (problematic with multi-monitors, the charm bar is thin enough that I often find my cursor on the other monitor by the time I get to the center of the screen height), and then click.

This is a lot more effort than “throw the mouse down and left, click” and it also goes against the muscle memory we have built up for 17 years now to open the start menu. Really, the way they have it now is the best solution.

Interesting to launch in California. I always thought the reason for launching in Florida was so that the vehicles would be over the ocean if something went wrong.

We’re off!

I’m kind of mesmerized by his mustache.

I disagree. With the button, it would be in the bottom left id there was no metro sidebar on the left, or a couple hundred pixels right if so. This made for a moving target, and made targeting it more than just “throw your mouse down and left”.

Making it a hot corner allowed them to always keep it in the same place, regardless of what is on the screen.

Stream is up. I’m really excited about this!