The Venice Project Interface oddities – a quick review

Before commenting about the interface I must say that the Venice Project client has very good table manners and generally behaves very nice, before installing it checks your hardware and informs you if your computer meets the requirements, uninstalling is also a breeze, very nice guys. Also, the video quality is pretty amazing, especially when compared to the traditional streaming alternatives, the Venice Project has a very fast initiation and almost no disturbances and freezes.The downsides are with the interface, aimed to be viewed in fullscreen mode, and probably later on through a TV, the texts are big (a la front row), the panels are clear and simple. However the interface suffers from few oddities, most annoying is the endless looped scrolling – Hey! this is really confusing, if you’re looping the menu items, let us know, put a loop marker at the end of each balk.
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The main panel that has all the ‘Play Controls’ also holds the Application Controls (Quit, Resize), while in the top-right corner of the screen there is a floating icon for hiding the current screen – shouldn’t it be the opposite? It seems that the Quit button should be always present and not associated with the playing controls, furthermore, the Hide Screen is inconsistently appearing inside & outside of panels.
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Another issue is the keyboard arrows, while in the ‘My Channels’ screen it is so easy and fast using them to navigate in & out of channels, in ‘Channel Catalog’ moving back to the Suggestion menu is not possible, only Up & Down.. Once I enter the ‘Channel Catalog’, I can only exit, cant go back to ‘My Channels’, even if I got there this way. come on, how will you menage a remote control navigation if you cant eat this?
Beside, it is not clear why the duplicated channels screens is needed, from the ‘Channels Catalog’ it is not possible to launch the channel, you can only add it to ‘My Channels’ – how can I know if I want to add this channel if no preview or description is available? after I added a channel to ‘my channels’ I cant remove it. ‘My Channels’ is also lacking the image/logo preview the ‘Channel Catalog’ has.
In ‘My Venice’ screen, pressing ‘My Venice Plugins’ button brings the ‘My Venice Menu’, hmm. the menu it self is mixing sections and items in the same level – News Ticker Manager along with the Feeds themselves..
Also, from the menu screen I cant know which item is enabled and needs to be clicked, and that’s the menu purpose.The feeds marquee is moving too fast for human reading.I still think that the general experience is great, and that the interface is not that bad for a beta, I hope it will improve in the future, and that we’ll see more content too :)

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