Pot Roasts and Windows Media Center

The Pot Roast Story, as it is commonly known, tells the story of a young wife who cooks her husband a pot roast for dinner. He asks her why she cut both ends off the meat before cooking it, and she replies that her mother always did it. Her curiosity is piqued, however, and so the next time she speaks to her mother, she asks her why she did this. Her mother replied that it was because that's what her mother (i.e. the wife's grandmother) always used to do. Accordingly, the mother then asks the grandmother why she did this, and the grandmother replied that they didn't have a pot big enough to roast the joint in, so she used to cut off both ends to make it fit. Here endeth the story.

I was reminded of this the other day when trying to record something on my Media Center PC. If you were around for reel-to-reel tape decks (which I wasn't really but my parents had an old one), or cassette recorders, or even just VHS decks, then you're probably familiar with buttons like this:

Handsome.

Now, the uninitiated might try to press that record button, but they wouldn't have much luck. That's because with a tape based system, when you start recording you destroy whatever is on the tape at that point. So the designers made it hard to press the record button by accident. As all right-thinking people know, to record, you will need to press the Record and Play buttons together, otherwise it won't work. This goes right back to reel to reel tape decks, such as this specimen, which seems to have (I'm guessing) two record buttons that you have to press together:

They don't make them like that any more.

Most VHS decks use a similar two-buttons-at-once system to guard against accidentally recording over something you want. Or you can remove the plastic tab from the tape - remember those? And the desperate hunting for a bit of sticky label when you realised you didn't want to keep the tape contents any more, but it was the only tape you had to hand, and you really wanted to record something that was on TV right now?

But I digress.

Later, VHS remote controls often used to hide the record under a slidey panel, or recess the record button so it was harder to press by accident, like this:

Try pressing that by accident.

Of course, with today's new technology of hard drive recorders, where you're not stuck with a fixed size media that can only hold recordings of a few programs at once, we don't have any need of such UI design, so the remotes for these products don't do this sort of thing.

Er, except...that remote - here's a bit more of it:

How quaint.

It's the official remote control for Windows XP Media Center Edition. For some reason, they think record is such a destructive operation that they should protect the user from it. Despite the fact that:

• Most of the time, the button has no effect (because people with DVRs usually don't watch live TV).
• You have gigabytes of disc space for recordings, so the only way it can be destructive is if your hard drive is full, and the recording on the bottom of the list falls off due to the new recording.
• With one of these devices, you're running the risk of losing recordings off the bottom of your list all the time, because it will be scheduled to record lots of things, and not just when you're watching TV and press the record button.

On the other hand, it does make the record button hard to press, which combined with the sluggish response of MCE when you ask it to record (there's no instant feedback until it's done whatever processing it decides to do), can make you think you haven't pressed it properly.

So, for example, I pressed record on something that I wanted to watch (a rare occurrence for me - watching Live TV), and then decided to record the whole series (which you do by pressing Record a second time). The record symbol stayed as a single red circle next to the programme, so I thought I hadn't pressed it, and pressed it again. After a few seconds, the '3 circle' logo appeared (meaning that the whole series will be recorded), so I went back to something else I was doing. Unknown to me, as soon as I turned away, a second later the third press was detected, which means "cancel recording". So when I went back to the TV 15 minutes later, I found that the program wasn't recording after all.

Genius.

I await the day when a child asks its parent "Why is the record button all flat and hard to press?", and the parent replies, "I have no idea."

It may remind you of this, if you live in the UK:

This sign means "Warning: Speed Camera"

I often wonder what most children make of that sign these days, given they quite possibly have never seen a camera that looks anything like that. I don't think I have, come to that, except in pictures.

« When UI Costs Lives | Like I Care! »