Shift: Press play to pay. [via Slashdot: Review of pressplay and RealOne] By coincidence, someone at Real.com saw my blurb yesterday where I mentioned offhand that there were lots of good reasons to avoid RealOne, and asked me to elaborate. This article elaborates on the futility of their business model, so I won’t. And I will pass over in silence Real’s history of privacy violations, it’s history of spyware, and it’s history of aggressive behavior (stealing file associations). These are all really particular examples of a more general problem: RealOne adopts the wrong posture.
User interface experts define the concept of application posture. Some applications ought to adopt a “sovereign posture”, e.g. take over the full screen, run on startup, put icons on the desktop, and so forth. I once helped develop an ERP system for distributors, and our application always maximized itself on startup. That was appropriate, because our users were using our application directly, 8 hours a day, to do their work. However, people do not sit for 8 hours a day looking at their music player (or if they do, they’re stoned and should probably seek professional help). A music player should adopt a transient, or even daemonic (background) posture. You may only run it once in a while, or even if you run it all the time, it’s not what you’re primarily interacting with.
Even during install, WinAMP adopts a transient posture. It clearly asks you during install whether to associate it with various types of files, including CDs you insert. It clearly asks you during install whether it’s all right for it to report anonymous usage statistics, and explains the (minimal) privacy implications of doing so. And then it quietly does exactly what you want it to do: play music as well as possible, with no muss or fuss or loss of precious screen real estate. It can be resized so small that it fits over the window title bar, or it can be minimized to the system tray (and stays there, even on subsequent relaunches). It understands that it is not the most important thing in your life or on your screen. WinAMP understands posture; RealOne does not.
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