Posted by ether
View CommentsCNetTV’s new player is out and the interface is extremely well done. I only wish it had worked in Firefox on my very commonplace T43 Thinkpad with XPSP2 and all the usual updates.
The Quick Tour is not needed in terms of getting started, but it does do a great job of highlight CNet’s Product Management savvy. The PM team deserves a lot of credit on this one; it’s not easy to negotiate the millions of options and competing stakeholder interests to complete a complex design like this (as much as we’d love to see Epiphany and Konquerer support some day). And there will be plenty of more essential bugs to address … like the new player didn’t work for me on FF w/ XP right out of the box. But overall, if you have your updated and Flash player and IE, you should be in good shape.
#1 on the wish list for all these services: STANDARDS COMPLIANCE for mobility. I’m not talking about playing into the How-Can-We-Kill-WiMAX cellular carrier G3 push, I’m talking about web standards that enable people to use any standards-compliant web browser on any web-standards compliant device.
While Opera has probably done the most to make up for design-side limitations from a browser standpoint, it would be great to see more providers sticking to more widely supported standards like Java (or even following the guidance to use UTF-8 as default!) in order to reach the widest possible audience, including Linux and BSD (hence, Mac/Darwin) geeks; who can be some of the most dynamic evangelists for any new technology or service. Satisfy that critical 1%, and you just may win a more lucrative micro-market than you imagine, and perhaps capture a larger chunk of 99% at a faster clip, as a bonus.
Posts Feed