Maybe ‘Virtually Interminable Searches’?

Tandy loaned Seybold one of its new Video Information System (VIS) home multimedia devices and about 20 pieces of software to play on it, so associate editor David Baron took it home for a test drive. Here are his impressions.

The task in evaluating such a device is determining who is at fault for each of the problems encountered. In this case, the choices are (a) Tandy, (b) Microsoft (for the Modular Windows operating system) or (c) the title developer.

Often all three entities appeared to conspire to create something truly awful and unusable. Occasionally a developer had some measure of success in overcoming the platform’s inherent limitations. The upshot, however, is that on first glance, VIS appears to be a lesson in what the consumer does not want.

The TV was blameless. After hooking up the VIS player to my television set, each session and almost every title left me with a desire to stick my foot through my TV which, for once, was blameless. It would appear that Tandy, and its partner in crime, Microsoft, have done very little right in trying to create a consumer multimedia player.

The player itself is remarkably plain, with only two buttons on the front panel: eject and power. In addition, Tandy includes only an RF cable to attach the player to a VCR, cable box or directly to the television set. There are RCA plugs (standard stereo cables and plugs) in the back of the player to connect with audio and video components, but in what appears to be either a cost-cutting measure or an underestimation of what equipment the consumer is likely to already own, Tandy does not include RCA cables. Certainly if this machine is to replace the standard CD Audio player in the home, it should be equipped to do so “right out of the box.”

THREE PROBLEMS: SPEED, GRAPHICS, INTERFACE DESIGN

There are three main problems to be found in both the VIS box itself and its titles: speed, or lack thereof; unrecognizable graphics; and interface design that is inconsistent at best, truly ridiculous at worst.

The central processor for the VIS player is a 12-MHz Intel ‘286 microprocessor — well on its way to being extinct in the personal computer world — with only 1 MB of accompanying RAM. (For sake of comparison, most personal computers today are shipped with 4 MB.) Tandy has added some special processors for graphics and television display, as well as reorganized the data bus to expedite the transfer of information and interactivity.

BUT EVEN WITH ALTERATIONS, IT’S STILL TOO SLOW.

We’re not talking about a few seconds to find a piece of information, but sometimes 15 to 30 seconds or more for the machine to respond to a click of the remote control device.

After such a click, there is rarely any kind of feedback that you have initiated an action, except that the cursor/arrow disappears, and you are left wondering whether you’ve actually initiated an action or just broken or locked up the device.

Actually, the first thing you notice when loading a CD-ROM into the VIS player is that for a full, yawning minute, the screen remains an empty blue with only the Windows hourglass to keep you company before the opening screen pops up. This proved to be an ominous portent of things to (eventually) come.

I have determined that VIS now officially stands for virtually interminable searches.

GUESS WHAT, DEVELOPERS? NTSC IS LOW RESOLUTION!

Slow would be bearable if there was an accompanying trade-off for high-quality graphics. But most of the graphic elements in titles I used reproduced very poorly on a television set.

Detailed icons and elaborate graphics and typefaces — not to mention the cardinal sin for TV graphics, single-pixel lines — do not display well on interlaced NTSC monitors. Yet almost all these elements appear in every VIS title.

Disastrous results. Tandy and Microsoft must have been so convincing in their spiel about how easy it was to move PC-based titles to the VIS platform that most of their developers (most likely with MPC titles on the market already) did not bother to adapt these elements to TV viewing. The results are disastrous.

For example, some use red outlines, of single-pixel widths, to highlight an on-screen “hot” button. These are virtually impossible to see.

In the Compton’s encyclopedia, for another example, the tool bar on the right side of the screen was largely unreadable on a 13 inch television set. To this day, I can’t make out what the icon for hyperlinks is supposed to be. Perhaps the assumption is that anyone with enough money to buy a VIS player would have at least a 25 inch television set to play it on.

Though I hope that’s not true, I still found most of the graphic elements in most of the applications to be too small, with too much detail, to be pleasant or even possible to view on a TV screen.

Buttons for days? Microsoft created standard objects, such as on-screen buttons, arrows and scrolling tools, for developers to use in their work, which are meant to make title creation easier. And most of the developers took advantage of those tools, with very mixed results.

The first generation of titles are pretty darned button-happy. Certainly buttons make user choices more obvious (“click here for personal biography,” or “click here for professional history,” for example), but their utility in the user interface is limited, either by how the developer uses the tools, or how the tools were created by Microsoft.

Examples are easy to find: Microsoft added the ability for users to jump or tab from button to button, without having to navigate around the screen with the joystick. On the surface, this sounds like a handy addition, but in practice it is a mess.

Input Device Fu. First of all, the assumption with a joystick-type controller is that you will be able to move the cursor around the screen. If, however, this feature is in place, you may be faced with the strange situation where you thumb to the right, and the arrow moves down and to the left. Or, you have to click through an entire series of buttons and options before you get to the one you want.

In combination with the slow searches, this becomes deeply frustrating. In the Better Homes and Gardens Healthy Cookbook, published by Multicom, I tried to find a recipe for roast turkey. So I clicked on the box called Food Index, then the box “by type” and then the “Poultry” menu (each took more than 10 seconds to load). When the Poultry menu came up, there were a number of recipes displayed in alphabetical order.

FROM MAIN MENU TO ‘TURKEY?’ 43 CLICKS

Only 10 recipe titles display on a screen at one time. At the end of the 10 displayed selections, the cursor jumped to four command buttons on the bottom of the screen, and then back to the top of the list again. In order to continue reading the list, you had to press the “next page” button at the bottom of the screen. Turkey was listed on page four. This means that from the main menu to the turkey recipe, I clicked on the remote control 43 times.

An alphabetical search of recipes took 38 clicks. (Simply to get to the letter T, you have to click through the entire alphabet, one letter at a time. This is particularly frustrating, since the letters are laid out in a grid of six letters wide by four deep, but you can only move through the alphabet sequentially, not randomly.)

Cooking in the living room. You must actually depress the remote control button for every cursor movement; unlike most computers and some telephones, holding down a button for a longer period will not repeat the command. Needless to say, I found the same recipe in my own cookbook many times faster. And the cookbook was in my kitchen, not in my living room.

Along with the tabbing “feature” came another problem: a poor relationship between the display button and the location of the cursor. In one title, the Great Lives series by the JLR Group, there were buttons on the top right and left corners of the screen. The arrow cursor was slightly outside the box on the right, and the action button activated the tool on the other side of the screen (which in this case took me back to the opening menu). Of course, had I been able to see the thin red line surrounding the “hot” button, I might have readjusted the cursor but it was one of the accursed single-pixel lines, so I could barely make it out.

And finally, breaking another cardinal rule of consumer electronics, the buttons on the remote control device cause different actions in different titles. Compton’s encyclopedia uses the “B” action button to move directly to the tool bar, while in Great Lives or the Better Homes Cookbook the same button initiates the current selection.

Less is more better. It would appear that many of the titles first ported to the VIS machine were created with little thought to how people would use them. Only a few of the titles, including Xďphias’s New Basics Cookbook, Brøderbund’s Grandma and Me, and the Discis Kids Can Read series, had a user interface that was immediately understandable and workable.

The best titles were the simplest — they did not require long database searches, but focused instead on the information on screen, with a few multimedia elements added in. This is especially true of the children’s titles, which is where Tandy is staking out its niche for this player.

A FEW TIPS TO MAKE VIS A REAL PRODUCT

But no one will buy a VIS — or any multimedia player — simply for children’s titles. The value of using standard media such as CD-ROMs is that players can, and should, be multipurpose. If Tandy and Microsoft want to make VIS a product with broad appeal, they must at least:

• Stop talking about the ease with which titles can be ported from the MPC platform and start working with the developer community to create interfaces that are simple and intuitive.
• Demand consistency in user interface and remote control use (different buttons cause different actions in various titles).
• Learn how to create graphic elements and icons that are effective on an interlaced, NTSC monitor.

And they must figure out a way to speed up the player’s performance, whether that requires a faster processor and/or more memory. Otherwise, this thing is as stillborn as Microsoft’s MPC, which suffers from many of the same problems, most notably too low a lowest common denominator.

ONE LAST NOTE: HOW TO REACH A LOW BOIL

Modular Windows includes hooks into Video for Windows (VFW), Microsoft’s digital video toolkit. VFW allows title developers to include windows of video in their applications.

In the Better Homes Cookbook, for example, each recipe has a list of video instructions that apply to the cooking terms and skills called for in the recipe. My personal favorite was a video clip titled “Boiling.” After calling for the video to play, and waiting the requisite 15 seconds for it to load into memory, a pot of boiling water appears on the screen. A voice follows with these words: “Heat liquids until bubbles rise to the surface of the liquid in a steady pattern.” End of clip. Boy, was I glad I waited for that!

David Baron