I am not too impressed with MSN Video Downloads yet. Why not?
- I don’t have a miniSD card yet for my phone - this is the only reason I am still willing to try it again when I do get the card.
- The user interface is horrible:
- There’s no feedback for when I click on links.
- There’s a big ugly gray bar at the top that just says “Download Status”…what the heck is that big waste of space?
- There are links to different services, but I’m not sure how they all tie in together.
- Under HELP, there is a View All link. View all what? I figured it meant video’s, but no it’s the help. Were there any other help items to indicate what this was referring to…not really.
- There’s one “View My Music” link, but no view my video’s, or TV, or anything else…why not? I thought this was MSN video downloads?!
- The links are not intuitive - I click on download status and it appears to sign me out. When I’ve selected download status, there’s nothing to indicate that’s the page I’m on. Same with the other links. How the hell do I know what I’m doing??!
- It’s just plain damn ugly!
- When I try to play licensed content that I don’t have a license for, it prompted me for a password to some random site - admin.theplatform.com?? Michael Creasy is confused as well.
- Media Player 10 continually crashed on me and McAfee also seems to think there is some sort of Buffer Overflow in wmplayer.exe::GetProceAddress… Granted we all know how much I like McAfee.
At least when Google puts their products out in beta, they usually look good and work well. Who at Microsoft let this thing out the door?? This is how Microsoft works though. They come out with something that doesn’t work too well, but tons of people still use it because of amazing marketing. They figure out what’s wrong with, fix a lot of things, but it’s still fundamentally flawed. Nevertheless “product” snags the majority of marketshare due to several factors. I have no doubt that MSN Video Downloads will be great at some point, but man does it suck right now.
Update: Maybe something was wonky with my laptop, but at least now the page says “View My Videos” and when I click on links, there is a status bar at the bottom that tells me what’s going on. That addresses a couple of my issues…