Reader Report on Front Row

TUAW reader, and personal friend, Lance was kind enough to send me two rather long emails detailing his first and second impressions of Front Row on his brand new iMac. So here's the second of those emails for your edification, broken up into the negatives, the positives, and the strange bits about Front Row: "Negative. iPod is a no show. Doesn't show up in your menu. So you have to have songs on the hard drive and in iTunes to choose your music. Photo Slideshow. It is great, except that that stupid Ken Burns effect is on and there is no way to turn it off. So you can't just see your photos because it is randomly zooming and panning and cutting off someone's head." Can anyone verify the Ken Burns part? I think it is most likely the default and would hope that there is a way to turn it off that Lance has overlooked, because Apple has made it hard to find (why are preferences for things getting harder and harder to find in Apple land?). Lance continues with the somewhat negative, noting "Apparently there is no way to interact with Front Row except through the remote. No other way to open the application except with that little remote and its menu button. So don't lose the remote! There needs to be some other way to open the app through the keyboard or an icon. That is just strange...unless the real purpose of this application isn't for a computer with a keyboard..."

More after the jump...

"Positive. Apparently you don't have to have your movies in iTunes. Any folder in your Home/Movies folder shows up! Any movies in those folders show up, so you don't have to organize your videos with iTunes. This is interesting especially since the music and photo menus don't work this way. What does this mean that Apple has up their sleeve?" This is good.

"Strange. The movies that you play in iTunes, if you stop them and then go back to them later they seem to start where you left off. But in Front Row no such luck. The movie always starts at the beginning. And the only way to fast forward is by holding down on the next button on the remote. No mouse controls to jump ahead or anything. So if you are watching a 30 minute movie then that is a lot of fast forwarding. I've already just jumped back out of front row and just started watching the quicktime file. I'm sure this will be fixed, but it's kinda strange since iTunes handles it well." That's a bit annoying. I'd like to see the interface both here and in iTunes and on the new video capable iPod mirror the behavior of most of the PVRs that I've used: clicking on a previously played video prompts you with the option to either Play or Play from the beginning. That would be a nice little interface tweak.

Thanks, Lance!