I fired up my iMac this morning and ran over to www.NBCOlympics.com full of excitement to see the video experience that I've heard Microsoft and NBC talking about for the past few months.
I've never installed Silverlight on a Mac before, and I was intentionally not installing anything, so I could get a feel for the end user experience.
At the last minute, I decided to do a lazy mans recording with my Sony pocket cam, just pointed at the screen, so the clarity isn't that great, but you get the idea, and the experience I was trying to capture.
Check out the video, which I've uploaded to my Flickr account. The whole process was less than 90 seconds, which is great, because Flickr video maximum time in 90 seconds. Lucky me.
Once the vide player / Silverlight engine was installed, I was amazed at the clarity of the streaming video. it's amazing. In fact the streaming video footage, it better quality than the commercials I saw, which were all pretty grainy. Probably due to the way they were originally encoded.
I'm excited to watch the Olympics online this year, because I'll get to watch what I want, when I want, with much MUCH more coverage. I won't be locked into what scheduled in TV guide.
I wonder if the Archives will stay online after the Olympics are over?
A few days ago, I created a UserVoice.com website for iPhone to keep track of bugs, features, and application ideas that I have specific to the iPhone. I really want love my iPhone, but currently am having a really hard time with it.
Others have started using the site as well, and it's created quite a few questions inside my daily community.
Will Apple see these?
If they do, will Apple care, or do they already know all this?
To me, not having quick dial by name is so frustrating, and tops my list. With my Samsung BlackJackII, I use the keypad and just start dialing a name, and the matches are shown in a list to choose from. Dialing by name couldn't be faster. J-A, and I already have all the phone numbers for Jamie that I need. Fast and Easy.
With iPhone, you first have to click home, then phone, then contacts, then get your tiny finger into the search bar, then start typing. Man, I could have been done with my phone call already. And making calls while driving is much MUCH more difficult. Interestingly enough, not a lot of people agree with me :( as you can see by the list on the top right, "dial by name" is one of the features that I think is most lacking, but it only has one vote, and the vote is mine.
So this got me thinking. Why don't people agree with me? Maybe they do, but I put a bad title on it. Maybe it should be "Dial by name from they number/alpha phone keypad, so I don't crash my car". Maybe I need to market and campaign for users to vote on Dial By Name and this will get Apple's attention. Maybe not enough people have visited http://iPhone.UserVoice.com account to get an accurate count of what people think. Or, maybe my 2400 contacts and I are a minority, and this isn't really a big deal to the iPhone population.
Is it cool for an End User to start their own support site, for a product that they want to make better?
The thing that makes UserVoice.com so great is the voting. You don't need an account to vote, you can do it anonymously. You can also add suggestions, bugs, and feature requests without an account. There are features you may want to sign up for (free) like email notifications if others comment on your item, or the item get's fixed.