Me: I live in Silicon Valley with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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Today I looked at my credit card bill and saw the $10 charge for Urge. I had forgotten that I signed up for Urge, and of course was annoyed because I've used it 3 times. That's right. I went through the rigmarole of getting WMP11 and getting all the urge software installed, then of course dealing with some DRM corruption issues that were perplexing requiring that I download some software from Napster to fix the problem. Ugh. So I went and cancelled service today. At least they make that easy.
Anyway, I didn't find Urge to be anything special. Not $120 a year special. It reminded me of my Napster experience albeit Windows Media Player has a bit more lipstick on it (still not pretty, no amount of lipstick will fix my complaints with WMP... take a look at the mess called the options and skins dialog to see what I mean).
The other day I read something that Thomas Hawk wrote that really resonated with me.
"Why else doesn't this excite me? Because Windows Media Player largely sucks right now and this is the software I'd likely use to interact with the device if I were to own one. This fact, Windows Media Player sucking (to be fair for me as a large digital music collector), has in fact dampered my whole spirit these days when it comes to digital music."
While Thomas does a lot of complaining about WMP, and while I don't agree with 100% of what he says, I do feel the same way. I am not excited about audio on my computer any more. It's a dreary, unfun, boring experience interacting with music through my desktop or laptop. I don't even bother copying my music collection to my laptop any more. The only place I have "fun" with my media library is on my Windows Media Center (which has a great music browsing/playing experience) and my iPod + iTunes. iTunes isn't an amazing piece of software, but I like using it. And please, I'm not going to get a 2 GB Clix so that I can have a tolerable experience syncing and playing my music on a portable device.
Lets hope Zune moves the needle.
PS - What is the deal with removing the menu bar from the applications? I don't understand this. It's one thing to remove the menu bar if it's clear and obvious how to do all the features that require the menu bar w/o having to use the menu bar. Sorry, but WMP doesn't do this right. They made it even harder in WMP11 to get to the menu which seems to be the only way I can figure out how to change a skin.