Discussions

13 hours ago, Charles wrote

It's not that it's TV-capable, but how so and what that actually means (it's more than signal processing...). It's not that the device can see, hear and speak to you, but how so and what that actually means (there is no predetermined limit to what you can do with it - as programmers and users alike).

I agree that not all is known about the device yet, but we do know that it comes with IR blasters, and we know that those suck from 20 years of experience. Sure, HDMI-CEC would cure those ills, but we also know that cable companies suck at those sorts of things. We also know that there's no DVR functionality, so.. yeah. 

I agree that it's about what it all means, in the end, but judging from the things we know at this point, it means that absolutely nothing will change in terms of cable TV.

13 minutes ago, vesuvius wrote

*snip*

I have put this question through to a couple of Teachers, I'm afraid you're on your own with that one.

The ability to learn how to find information yourself is the quality that has helped me to succeed. Your attitude is that students should all join Fora, and have their questions politely answered.

Yes, that's obviously exacly what I'm saying. I can see how the ability to find information yourself has not only helped you succeed, but has also greatly increased your levels of comprehension.

@cheong: I'm aware of that policy, and it's a retarded one. Not doing people's homework for them, fine, but helping out a beginnner? I don't see anything wrong with that. Beginners often have no idea what is relevant to include in their questions either, so of course their questions are going to be sparse on information. That's the whole point: they're still learning. No harm in giving them a few pointers to help them get underway.

I'm not aware of any Channel 9 policiy against homework questions, but I personally have a policy against telling someone who is trying to learn to * off to some other website and do their own homework. So there's that.

26 minutes ago, Bass wrote

Am I the only one who seems to have no real problem working with the smart TV stuff? I mean both HBO Go and Amazon let you browse movies/TV shows using a mildly attractive multi-layer list view, search for content using a hipster-themed textbar and on-screen keyboard with autocomplete, and when selected it lets you um play whatever at the expected framerate as well as pause/rewind/fast-forward whatever you are playing. It's nothing revolutionary, but it does what it says it does. What else is it suppose to do? I mean is this like not working for anyone else? Well *, maybe I'm just really lucky or something or got some fancy new model Samsung smart TV?

Yeah you can improve on it, maybe make it read your mind and preemptively selected content to play but it already takes all of 30 seconds to select a movie already so..

I can only speak for myself, but all the built-in apps on TV's I've ever used are unwieldy, take a long, long time to start, occasionally take a second or two to respond to any input, rely on text input via a remote control, have limited content, and are never updated after release.

Real nice, guys. What a great, welcoming community we have here.

Ontopic: it's hard to give a decent answer without more information about the UI framework you're using. Is it Winforms? WPF? What you want to look into is parsing strings into numbers to convert the string "52" into the number 52. int.Parse() and double.Parse() should get you going. As for the button presses, you want to look into how the UI framework you're using handles input events. You want to subscribe to an event the textbox fires when its value changes or a key is pressed. In the event handler, look at the textbox's value or the event arguments passed to your event handler, and figure out if, for instance, a "+" key was pressed.

Look into that, and that should get you going.

6 hours ago, Bass wrote

@quibit:

Pretty soon everyone is going to have TVs that come with apps built in, it's pretty standard in pretty much all mid-to-high range TVs these days and they can go watch video to all the major video providers (I doubt Google will allow Xbox One to support YouTube for instance).

Those apps are universally slow and terrible though. There's plenty of room for someone to swoop in with something smooth and less unwieldy.

As for Youtube, they already allow the Xbox 360 to support it. I'm pretty sure they'll allow any device that sells in the millions to support it, so if the One sells...

Besides, I've always been told that you don't need native apps. Just a browser and HTML5 will suffice, right?

I agree with the Xbox Live Gold thing though, that's a major millstone. If they keep restricting their premium services to Gold then I'm not sure what the difference is between paying a cable provider for their box of content or Microsoft for their box of content.

That's the case over here too. Except it's not mini monopolies: it's two massive monopolies, and no-one else. The paying for more hardware and content thing is rampant here too.

I can't see the Xbox One working with one of our cable companies at all. It doesn't appear to have a tuner or card slot, and with HDMI in and an IR blaster, you still have to deal with the cable company's crappy UI and associated software. Which sort of defeats the entire point of the One.

I imagine a few years into the one's lifetime nobody has to deal with this crap anymore and everybody will just get their content from online services, but that doesn't help come november.

Price notwithstanding, I still see the One as a better allround solution than Apple TV/Google TV/Samsung SmartTV though, which I guess is the actual point of the device.

@quibit: Not sure what you were expecting: they've said for weeks that the games-focused presentation would be at E3.

This past event wasn't even about competing with Sony. It was very obviously about competing with Apple and Google.

@ScottWelker:I urge you to read the next sentence of that post as well.

Consumers are not okay with this, and will vote with their wallets. Just look at Steam, it would have been a huge success if only people were able to resell their games.