WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 41748461

(no title)

handity | 1 year ago

As somewhat of a Zune fanatic, it always makes me happy to see a new Metro-inspired UI, but every one of these Zune-inspired projects falls short when compared to the actual Zune application, which imo is the absolutely pinnacle of music players. It presents your music library in a way that to me is aesthetically pleasing and entirely intuitive. The three column layout, with sorting options for each, is ideal. Filtering does not dump you into a new page. It's hard to describe what makes it so pleasant to use, but no application I've found yet comes close.

I encourage anyone with a local music collection to go download Zune and give it a try.

discuss

order

Novosell|1 year ago

Might Dopamine be of interest? It has a similar 3 pane interface at least.

https://digimezzo.github.io/site/software

losses|1 year ago

Dopamine is indeed a good software, but the version on non-Windows operating systems is based on Electron. I think that's really overkill for a music player.

Rinzler89|1 year ago

IMHO Xbox 360, Zune, Windows 7-10 Mobile and Metro were very good UX implementations at their time, and bizarrely far superior to the touch mode Windows 11 offers today on tablets. WTF Microsoft, why are you regressing on all fronts?!

Zune never took off because it came too late and was going against a market already dominated by the iPod, and Metro was hated since Microsoft shoved it down the throats of desktop users with Windows 8, even though it was wonderful to use on tablets, except Windows tablets of the time sucked major ballsack since they were powered by anemic Intel Atom CPUs trying to run a full desktop OS compared to the ARM iPads running a mobile OS.

lovethevoid|1 year ago

Microsoft’s decisions on windows will always be very funny. Push a gloriously designed tablet UI onto everybody, face backlash because nobody was buying windows tablets so it was tacky on desktop, come out with good windows tablets finally (or hybrid ones) but change the UI to a compromise that neither desktop or tablet users enjoy.

philistine|1 year ago

Zune never took off because Apple unveiled iPhone soon after.

When all the news and talks are about this iPod killer from Microsoft and then Apple themselves release a truly groundbreaking iPod killer themselves, you look foolish. Zune really got done in by marketing.

hammyhavoc|1 year ago

Zune never took off just like HoloLens, Band, Kinect and Windows Phone didn't take off—not because they were in any way late, but because Microsoft is never "all-in" with any of these ventures.

The Xbox was somewhat of an anomaly owing to exclusives like Halo and Gears of War, but it's floundering, and in some countries, like Japan, it's just never taken off, period.

Apple Vision doesn't seem to be a sensation in terms of sales figures, despite the HoloLens beating Apple to the punch, and the stereotypical nonsense being "Apple is always late, but they always do it right". HoloLens just got killed along with Windows Mixed Reality.

Hell, even the Microsoft Band beat the Apple Watch to market.

The problem is that merely having a presence in a niche doesn't guarantee success as it once did. Now, you need to actually iterate, innovate, and satisfy the minimum expected threshold of solving real problems. This is also what Tim Cook's Apple struggles with these days.

What's the killer app for Apple Vision? What was it for HoloLens?

When digital technology was new and exciting, having anything would draw buyers. Now, we're spoiled for choice, things move fast, it isn't years between models, it's months to a year. Early adopters tend to get a bad experience too.

wodenokoto|1 year ago

Windows mobile gets a lot of flak but the early phones were really impressive with a beautiful, original, fast and user friendly UI.

That doesn’t happen often.

yndoendo|1 year ago

Apple controls the full driver stack while Microsoft does not. I've had to re-work HID interaction on Windows with WinForms and WPF to work around problematic touch interface drivers on Windows 7 and 10.

Microsoft is more towards licensing software to make money versus making a quality product top down.

jitl|1 year ago

Surface Pro with Windows 8 was pretty good, great performance on that device. I did a lot of sketching and some D&D world building with the pencil :). But the UX had a lot of frustrating spots where you still end up using Windows 95 UI because Microsoft didn’t care to update everything.

dgellow|1 year ago

Current windows UI and esthetics is pretty good imho, if you ignore the ads being pushed everywhere. I really like WinUI 3

Yhippa|1 year ago

That Zune music subscription was Spotify before Spotify was Spotify

Mountain_Skies|1 year ago

About a dozen years ago my employer wanted an intranet app for our mobile devices. Initially I was disappointed to have been assigned to create the Blackberry app because even though it was by far the most common phone in use by our employees, I could see the writing on the wall with Android and the iphone taking over. But I was also given free reign on the UI, which I borrowed very heavily from the Zune's UI. While it was well received, RIM really started falling apart around that time, which accelerated the replacing of the company issued Blackberries with BYOD. I was sad to see it go but also glad to be freed of the frustration of dealing with RIM and their often offline 'signing server'.

BenFranklin100|1 year ago

Can you download Zune for Windows 11? I have a couple of Zunes I would love to put back in service.