Caveat pumptor
Some
time before last Christmas, we bought matching pairs of Sony's portable
MP3 players. The hardware itself is OK and I have no complaints about
it, except that for some mystical reason when I keep it in the pocket
of my suede leather jacket and then make a sudden move (for example,
rush to cross a green light before it turns red) the player just turns
itself off. Since other sudden movements such as shaking the player in
my hand do not have this effect, my present hypothesis is that this
strange phenomenon has something to do with static electricity.
What I can't even comprehend is the software that came with the device. It is called SonicStage 3, and is needed to put music in the player: you can't just use Windows Explorer to move music into the player through the ordinary filesystem. The user interface and the whole user experience of SonicStage are such absolute and total pieces of shit that I can't understand how a major reputable company such as Sony could ever put out something like it. And it's not just because this is the first version, but we are at version 3. Doesn't Sony really have any kind of quality control department or usability research lab, and if they do, isn't it about time for the Sony executives to take a look what these people are doing?
Well all right, I can kind of understand why Sony's marketing and legal departments want to enforce digital rights management and forced the engineers convert all MP3 files to their own proprietary format that the player understands. It's just that this conversion is slow. But even so, this is the least of the problems in SonicStage, and the major problems cannot possibly be blamed on the marketing or legal departments but stand squarely on the shoulders of the engineers and programmers. The user interface of SonicStage is so strange, nonintuitive and idiosyncratic that even the basic operations such as adding a file or a set of files to a playlist are horribly painful to do. The software tries to be helpful and list music files as albums, but without any logic behind it as far as I can tell. Several times I have been lost in the software trying to bring up some basic feature that seems to have completely disappeared.
But eventually we certainly get to the point where there are music files on the left and the player's music list is on the right, and we can start transferring files to the player. Because of the automatic and compulsory conversion to Sony's proprietary format, it takes a while to transfer even a handful of files. And it's a pretty long while. And what you do know, after transferring or deleting even one file, the software insists on reading the contents of the player again, displaying them in speed of perhaps one file per second! I guess it would be just too hard for the program to freaking ask once and then remember what files there are in the player, since they don't just magically vanish from the player on their own. (Or do they? Considering everything else that we have seen so far, this might actually be a frightening possibility.)
I guess that at least one engineer working for Sony did pay at least a little attention to usability and the user experience. Since many users often accidentally erase things that they don't really want to erase, every modern software program displays a helpful confirmation dialog before erasing. Of course, SonicStage does not bother to show in this confirmation dialog what file it is erasing, making the whole confirmation process only an annoyance of extra click. But I guess that it's not really that big a deal, since even when they contain useful information of what is going to be erased, confirmation dialogs are still useless, since clicking "OK" without thinking quickly becomes automatic for the user. And at least for me, every time that I have accidentally deleted something that I didn't want to (or made some other irrevocable mistake of that nature), I came to realize my mistake only much later, so the confirmation dialog was useless. Now, if only there was some way to make programmers aware of this new concept called "undo"...
The creators of SonicStage, apparently aware of the problems with confirmation dialogs, have ingeniously solved them by displaying after each confirmation dialog a second confirmation dialog that asks if the user really is sure. I wish I was joking here, but I am not.
Last night I was trying to organize things a little and clear something that I believed was my playlist, since it had accumulated so much junk in it. Well, actually it turned out to be the list of all music files. Good thing the checkbox "erase files from directory" was unchecked (and I have actually seen programs in which an equivalent checkbox was on by default). I realized my mistake after I had clicked through the two confirmation dialogs and erasing was already underway. The dialog had a button labelled "Stop", but for some mysterious reason, this button was in the disabled state so that clicking it had no effect. These people sure know how to turn the blade once it's in to maximize the pain. After the operation was finished, every single playlist in the program was completely empty.
Like many other programs these days, SonicStage has its own "cool" look and feel that does its best to look like Apple's Aqua, but of course it then goes to use the standard Windows dialogs. Especially the ones that start out small and can't be resized no matter what you try. You might think that two decades of experience with Windows would have taught Microsoft that users sometimes want to resize windows when they want to see what's in them. But no, there still are file selection dialogs that simply can't be resized. Although it's not like the modern file selection dialog of Windows XP is a picnic either, since it steadfastly refuses to remember what size I want to use it in and whether I want to see the files of some folder as icons, list or details.
Actually, I now hold the opinion that the whole idea of user interface that has a separate free-moving window for each program is useless. As far back as I can remember, every single program that I have used I always used so that its window fills the whole screen (except the taskbar, of course, that use to switch between programs). The screen would have to be about four times its current size so that I would even consider having several programs open in separate windows shown to me at the same time. Therefore every program should run its own window which should automatically be maximized, without even a possibility of resizing or moving it around.
But all in all, I don't think that I'll ever be buying anything that was manufactured by Sony ever again. And it looks like I am not the only person out there who believes that SonicStage sucks. And I am sure that it's just a coinkydink that after installing SonicStage, our computer seems to have gotten slower, especially as far as the file system and Internet connection are concerned.
What I can't even comprehend is the software that came with the device. It is called SonicStage 3, and is needed to put music in the player: you can't just use Windows Explorer to move music into the player through the ordinary filesystem. The user interface and the whole user experience of SonicStage are such absolute and total pieces of shit that I can't understand how a major reputable company such as Sony could ever put out something like it. And it's not just because this is the first version, but we are at version 3. Doesn't Sony really have any kind of quality control department or usability research lab, and if they do, isn't it about time for the Sony executives to take a look what these people are doing?
Well all right, I can kind of understand why Sony's marketing and legal departments want to enforce digital rights management and forced the engineers convert all MP3 files to their own proprietary format that the player understands. It's just that this conversion is slow. But even so, this is the least of the problems in SonicStage, and the major problems cannot possibly be blamed on the marketing or legal departments but stand squarely on the shoulders of the engineers and programmers. The user interface of SonicStage is so strange, nonintuitive and idiosyncratic that even the basic operations such as adding a file or a set of files to a playlist are horribly painful to do. The software tries to be helpful and list music files as albums, but without any logic behind it as far as I can tell. Several times I have been lost in the software trying to bring up some basic feature that seems to have completely disappeared.
But eventually we certainly get to the point where there are music files on the left and the player's music list is on the right, and we can start transferring files to the player. Because of the automatic and compulsory conversion to Sony's proprietary format, it takes a while to transfer even a handful of files. And it's a pretty long while. And what you do know, after transferring or deleting even one file, the software insists on reading the contents of the player again, displaying them in speed of perhaps one file per second! I guess it would be just too hard for the program to freaking ask once and then remember what files there are in the player, since they don't just magically vanish from the player on their own. (Or do they? Considering everything else that we have seen so far, this might actually be a frightening possibility.)
I guess that at least one engineer working for Sony did pay at least a little attention to usability and the user experience. Since many users often accidentally erase things that they don't really want to erase, every modern software program displays a helpful confirmation dialog before erasing. Of course, SonicStage does not bother to show in this confirmation dialog what file it is erasing, making the whole confirmation process only an annoyance of extra click. But I guess that it's not really that big a deal, since even when they contain useful information of what is going to be erased, confirmation dialogs are still useless, since clicking "OK" without thinking quickly becomes automatic for the user. And at least for me, every time that I have accidentally deleted something that I didn't want to (or made some other irrevocable mistake of that nature), I came to realize my mistake only much later, so the confirmation dialog was useless. Now, if only there was some way to make programmers aware of this new concept called "undo"...
The creators of SonicStage, apparently aware of the problems with confirmation dialogs, have ingeniously solved them by displaying after each confirmation dialog a second confirmation dialog that asks if the user really is sure. I wish I was joking here, but I am not.
Last night I was trying to organize things a little and clear something that I believed was my playlist, since it had accumulated so much junk in it. Well, actually it turned out to be the list of all music files. Good thing the checkbox "erase files from directory" was unchecked (and I have actually seen programs in which an equivalent checkbox was on by default). I realized my mistake after I had clicked through the two confirmation dialogs and erasing was already underway. The dialog had a button labelled "Stop", but for some mysterious reason, this button was in the disabled state so that clicking it had no effect. These people sure know how to turn the blade once it's in to maximize the pain. After the operation was finished, every single playlist in the program was completely empty.
Like many other programs these days, SonicStage has its own "cool" look and feel that does its best to look like Apple's Aqua, but of course it then goes to use the standard Windows dialogs. Especially the ones that start out small and can't be resized no matter what you try. You might think that two decades of experience with Windows would have taught Microsoft that users sometimes want to resize windows when they want to see what's in them. But no, there still are file selection dialogs that simply can't be resized. Although it's not like the modern file selection dialog of Windows XP is a picnic either, since it steadfastly refuses to remember what size I want to use it in and whether I want to see the files of some folder as icons, list or details.
Actually, I now hold the opinion that the whole idea of user interface that has a separate free-moving window for each program is useless. As far back as I can remember, every single program that I have used I always used so that its window fills the whole screen (except the taskbar, of course, that use to switch between programs). The screen would have to be about four times its current size so that I would even consider having several programs open in separate windows shown to me at the same time. Therefore every program should run its own window which should automatically be maximized, without even a possibility of resizing or moving it around.
But all in all, I don't think that I'll ever be buying anything that was manufactured by Sony ever again. And it looks like I am not the only person out there who believes that SonicStage sucks. And I am sure that it's just a coinkydink that after installing SonicStage, our computer seems to have gotten slower, especially as far as the file system and Internet connection are concerned.
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