51–60 of 84 posts
My Zune HD from 2005/2006 still works. I think it's the oldest piece of functional tech I own. No, I don't use it on a daily basis. But I love booting it up every now and again. It's also a fun way to check on what I was listening to back then. A little trip down memory lane.
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. Filter…
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. Filter…
Where can I get the Zune download? Searching on Zune just shows me the hardware.
https://archive.org/details/zune-package_202204 https://archive.org/details/zunepackage_4.8.2345.0
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I was sometimes involved in this project at MS. The music buying experience for Zune was awful, and I regret missed opportunities to be more forceful about telling the Windows Media execs that they were fucking up. Part of the problem was MS insistence on being fair to everyone and having an open system which led to 5000 shitty online stores where you could buy music. Instead of Apple that had exactly one where they…
What you’re describing is enlightening, thank you for sharing. The music purchasing workflow involved collaboration with the marketing people at Apple, which explains their successes.
And then a couple of weeks after each demo we'd get a call from the labels and they would tip us off that Apple had come to show them something special that they were working on, and of course that meeting went a lot easier than ours...
(also every record label on Earth was using Macs not PCs, so Microsoft's software either had to be run on a laptop we took, or we had to show them Microsoft's absolutely awful Mac software. PG, bless him, gave me his personal iBook for testing (complete with all his passwords and AOL account), which he probably got from Jobs, but I was in a belligerent anti-Mac era so I shoved it in a closet with the button nailed down and stuck it on that "hold the button" game for two years)
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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 user…
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.
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. Filter…
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 user…
Microsoft is more towards licensing software to make money versus making a quality product top down.
Dart and Rust mixed together. That's interesting. I'm wondering if Rust is needed for this application, couldn't everything technically done in Dart here? Also I'd like to know more about the interop between Dart/Rust and what the experience is like!
Hi, I'm the developer of Rune. In this project, Dart is primarily used for the GUI, while Rust handles all data-related operations. As you mentioned, Dart's performance and ecosystem are sufficient for most tasks in a typical music player. However, Rune includes some complex features that challenge Dart's ecosystem and performance, such as media recommendation. Rune has a built-in media analysis and recommendation sy…
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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.
The world was also not ready for music subscriptions. That was the really compelling benefit of Zune for me, that we take for granted today with Spotify et al. The vast majority of people I knew, even early adopter types, just could not wrap their head around the idea. “What happens when you stop paying? You’re left with NOTHING!”
My argument was to have all-you-can-eat streaming subscriptions, but it was shot down, and at the time mobile data was pretty shitty (I built the original streaming service on a 9600bps GSM modem in 1999) so you could only stream at home.
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Definitely. But even if the iPhone were to be delayed there's no way Zune would have made a significant dent in iPod's market. It was already the established player and the user base was already locked in with hundreds of $ in iTunes purchases. The usets weren't gonna throw that away no matter how much better Zune would have been. iPod's market dominance wasn't in some UX magic that couldn't be replicated or braten b…
> locked in with hundreds of $ in iTunes purchases Wasn't one of the big selling points that songs bought on iTunes were DRM-free? (Sorry, I went to search and you are right: Apple went DRM-free only on 2009)
p.s. haven't Apple been sneaking DRM back onto their music lately? I know all the videos are DRM, right?
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. Filter…