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Favorite Zune Feature

Sunday, November 26, 2006

I recently had a chance to play with a Microsoft Zune at Target and I was struck by one 'feature' that I hadn't heard about online. It wasn't WiFi or anything like that; it was anti-aliasing...or the lack of it.

When a user navigates the Zune interface the menu system animates by zooming while fading out. It's a nice effect...until you see it live. You see, when the menu is shown statically the text is anti-aliased, but as soon as the menu animation starts the anti-aliasing turns off. The text and images are then drawn all old-school sans anti-aliasing. The net effect is jagged text zooming larger and larger. Not pleasant nor polished. After the animation ends the text is drawn in it's final position with no anti-aliasing. Then anti-aliasing 'snaps' on and all the text on the screen is redrawn anti-aliased.

It's little things like this which make me appreciate the attention to detail and quality Apple puts into virtually all it's software and hardware. Even Rev. 1 products. On the flip side, this seems like a typical clueless design move allowed to ship by a management team desperately trying to imitate the iPod's success.

cheers, will
music: damien rice | 9

comments posted at 5:25 PM

Comments:

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