So, as a new user, I have some feedback/ideas on the UI - mostly low hanging fruit stuff- but I am uncertain where to post such suggestions, or if Channels/Forum is even interested in this sort of a thing). Most of these would not be specific to a particular UI/app
-HH
This is the best place. We're always happy to hear feedback.
Sounds good - so, here are a few. Keep in mind that I am new user and some of these may be lack of familiarity with the UI
1 - It became very popular recently to have an image based listings of things, like recorded shows. Thats kinda nice, but would it be possible to have a simpler interface with just names of the shows in a simple list? It may not look as "modern" but it is far more functional and so much easier to find what I am looking for without having to squint into every image. It also allows to have more than a few shows per screen, cutting down on endless paging through, a few shows at a time... Simpler and functional is always better than flashy and burdensome. Perhaps make it an option?
2 - As and add-on to last one, can we have an option in TV interface to list all shows - not just recent - and ability to get to the listing of the shows without having to go through 3 selections (for example in FireTV UI, I have to open main menu, select Recent, then scroll through the 7 recent recordings to get to and select More, and only then I see everything. There is no reason I should not be able to get to the full listing directly from the main menu - that seems to be needlessly annoying...
3 -(this seems to be more of a problem for FireTV version rather than Android or others, but all are affected), but it would be nice to be able to organize shows by seasons. For example, when I open one show(with many, many seasons) I added a pass to to record every showing of (my first one, to test things out) - I have a strip (again, why not a proper list?) of episodes in following order: 19, 16, 14, 13, 4, 3, 2, 1, 17" - now for one, these are in reverse order, for another, they are actually all from different seasons, of which there is no indication. At the least , it would be useful to put season separators in the strip, or write a season number before the episode number. like 17x19, 13x16, 9x14, etc. instead of 19,16,14. Of course I would much rather see a proper list instead of strip of icons - ideally with optional display of all episodes, including missing ones (with indication which ones are missing).
I want to add that while the Android version is much better in that sense (actually gives a list with season breaks), it still would be nice to not have the giant useless screenshot in the list as in landscape, on a 4k high-res screen of my giant phone I only can see one episode at a time (and about 4 at a time in vertical mode, better, but still pitiful)
On web interface, on my retina mac display - I see 5 episodes on a full screen browser.... That is crazy, considering a 1999 Tivo with standard definition output was able to easily show 10-20 lines.
This is especially annoying given that the random screenshot in the episode, which is what is taking up most of the space, is at best, useless, and at worst - may provide spoilers for some surprise down the line.
4 - The guide.... In the guide, once you look into a show details, there are a number of very useful badges like "new", "season premiere" and "series premiere" - and so on. These are AWESOME. But since they are only seen once you click on the show, they are also mostly useless. If you can optionally bring those out to the main TV Guide grid as icons next to the show (along with marking shows that have a pass on them and once being recorded) - that would be so much useful.(I know shows to be recorded are marked with a different color on Android, which is a good start, but that is not true of the web version) To make it even more useful, it would be awesome to be also able to filter the grid based on those badges. Also awesome would be ability to have a list of those in the 'search" - so that you can easily see a list of upcoming season and series premieres to see if you want to - makes it easy to discover new shows you may want to add a pass for.... The data seems to be there in the DB, so should not be too hard to add...
BTW, my experience with guild seems to be that the android/firetv version is extremely buggy and often not show any data for some channels and I find the timeline and show separate and no longer match - making for some serious confusion...
I am going to get off my curmudgeon old-timer soap box for a while - will post some more feedback later (if it is still welcome)
-HH