I got an invite to Voddler a while back (only open to Swedish people), it’s an application for watching streaming movies (and to some degree TV-shows). When I first tried out the application it crashed right out of the box, couldn’t get it running. So I gave up. Today I tried it again in an attempt to give it a fair review. And boy am I disappointed.
These guys don’t know what they’re doing. This is my instant feeling toward this application. It is so bad I hardly even know where to start. But I guess I’ll go in the order in which I discovered the problems.
First I might say a little disclaimer, the application is still in Alpha so it is very rough and instability is quite acceptable, a couple of problems are highly fixable but some are not.
Installation process
It is utterly clear that Voddler isn’t developed for the Mac, I don’t think any of them have ever used a Mac, they have no idea how applications are supposed to be installed and I suspect that they’re running a virtual machine to simulate a windows-like environment in which to run their application. Anyway, you have to download a .pkg and double click it to go through the classical “next, next, next, install” dialog install procedure that is typical to Windows. On a Mac, all you should have to do to install an application is drag the icon into the Applications folder. But that’s not the worst part, they require you to give the application your root password. This is just totally absurd, for any application that isn’t extremely tightly coupled to development and core modification you should never have to give your away your root password, it is just so unexplainably bad practice to require that. It is so bad that I wanted to say no and stop installing the crap right there, but I decided to give it a chance.
Interface
The installation-process stuff they could probably fix in the future when they put more resources and focus into the Mac market, this point however they can’t fix. The whole interface is completely wrong in every way. They could not have done this any worse. I’m not talking about design, that part is pretty good. What I can not accept is how the application completely takes over your entire computer, rendering it about as useful as a DVD player. It will not allow you to run in windowed mode and it will not allow you to use your mouse. Everything is keyboard-navigated and the whole interaction-process with the application is utterly unnatural and deeply confusing. I usually understand applications pretty quick but here I had to spend 5 minutes just figuring out how the fuck I should navigate a form to log in and then how to use the actual application. In every video-application in the world the space-bar means pause; not in Voddler though.
On top of this, the application doesn’t run full screen and you can’t change the resolution, this is because I run my screen at 1080p and the Voddler application is set to running 720p. If you run anything but 720p you can’t use the application because you can’t change the resolution. This is obviously a bug in some sort of auto-detection thingy so I can overlook it in an alpha release, but it makes the application unusable for now.
I can fully understand their choice to build the application this way if they were simultaneously developing some hardware box that ran Voddler that you could connect to your TV, so the hardware box and was their actual source of income. This would be a superb business-model but I’ve so far not seen anything about them doing so. If the people developing this are not completely retarded they will be releasing a hardware-box that you can connect to your TV, making the application somewhat useful.
Bad Practice
The Voddler application is riddled with bad practice application development. Things you simply should not do if you respect your customers. Besides the requiring root access, they install a background-process that they automatically add to your Startup Items so it’s guaranteed to be running all the time. This background-process seems to be handling all the network activity, sending and receiving video. If they plan to cut their streaming costs by some solution like Spotify (P2P’ing content between users) in the future, this means that they will be sucking my bandwidth whether I have the actual video-application running or not.
Conclusion
I did not buy a $2000 computer so I could use it as a DVD player. When I watch video I want to be able to go in and out of full-screen mode. I want to be able to switch between applications, use natural controls and interact with my mouse.
Using Voddler on a computer is utterly useless, it sucks, it blows. I can not express how disappointed I am with this product.
When Voddler releases a sleek sexy Apple TV-like box to come with the application however; I will recommend my dad to buy one, since I nor any other person with any technical interest uses a TV any more. I know of only one person my age that actually owns a TV.
If Voddler wants to have any chance at all at capturing a computer-based market, they need to make a computer application. Not some embedded crappy rootkit-ware that renders your computer completely useless for anything but watching rental-videos.
This is the kind of stingray I saw, not my picture though. It's maybe 40cm in diameter.
I just finished my theoretical test for the diving certificate. A lot of questions but they were easy and I got to do it here at “at home” so it was quite easy. Yesterday I did some confined water diving by the beach to learn some basic stuff (that I basically knew already) and today we went out by boat to some nice coral reefs.
At the reefs I did some more exercises and stuff like that but got some free-diving (that is, diving without having to do anything but enjoy yourself and watch the fish). I saw a blue-spotted stingray and I got to pet it! It really wasn’t afraid of people and just kind of swam into me. Pretty fun.
Tomorrow I will go out with the boat again. Because I was supposed to go out and do more exercises tomorrow but I already finished them, I will just go out to have fun. I think I’d rather just lay in the sun than spend a couple of hours on a boat, but what-the-hey diving is pretty fun!
A shitty store boasting better prices than Ullared - Gekås. I am speechless.
Wandering outside of the hotel neighborhood you find some small shops and some tourist-stuff but it’s really not that much. As far as I can tell, there is no local center with shopping and dining within a reasonable walking distance. It’s quite sad really. It seems that people here, myself included, live very confined within the hotel boundaries, now and again walking 50-200 meters outside of it to find a different restaurant than the one you ate at yesterday. I now only have two restaurants left. The only reason I ventured outside today was because I wanted to see some new stuff and have some more options for eating. Sadly, I don’t think I will be trying this again.
Abandoned construction; this is Hurghada.
As for the salesmen, i almost got roped in by another one today. I said I was from Sweden and he said “tjena broosscchhaaann” because that’s what he knew how to say in Swedish (means “hello brother” or the equivalent of “yo brooo”). He told me about his shop and I said I had to go and he told me he wanted something written in Swedish and I could help. So, I decided to help him. I knew he didn’t really have anything that he
needed me to write, but I thought I would write something and was interested as to what that would be. Unfortunately, as we came into his shop he didn’t give a hint about writing anything, he was just talking about his fucking perfumes. So I said I didn’t come to here to egypt to buy anything, I came to relax. He asked why I didn’t want to buy anything and I said I didn’t need it. It seems as if he was stumped by this, either because he thought that you couldn’t resist buying things just because you don’t need it, or he has never seen a westerner who thought he didn’t need anything. Anyway, with this argument I was quickly out of the store.
Delapedated housing is a common sight.
As I walked on and passed more salesmen and managed to somehow rustle my way out of talking with them (looking down in the street and not making eye-contact is a good start) I realized that I didn’t need to be Fredrik from Sweden. These salesmen have all adjusted their styles and sales-tactics to Swedish, Norweigan, Finnish and German people. Those are literally the only people who come here. So I thought about who I could be otherwise, being Japanese sure would help. When they stuck out their hand to greet me I could shake it and say “Hajimemashite, watashi wa Fredrik desu.” And as they tried to understand what had just happened and started speaking english with me I could say “eigo ga wakaranai” and then just repeat “wakaranai, gomen nasai, wakaranai” as I slowly walked away. The problem though; I don’t look very Japanese. So it would probably just be very weird and they’d probably try to keep me there or somehow follow me and talk to me because they knew I was outright lying (though I still might try it, could be fun).
A beautiful Mosque close to the hotel.
My second attempt at a different personality was John, from Portland, Oregon, United States of America. I literally came up with the name as he was asking me, I waited like 2 seconds and John was the first name that popped into my mind that was American enough. I have so far tried this personality on three salesmen and it actually works quite well. Being American has several advantages, I don’t care what things cost so when they say “It’s rrreally cheap for you my friend” I can say “I don’t really care about the price, this is just not my style”. Now this one could work for a Swedish person too of course. Being American also gives you an excuse to be rude, to not care about culture and use the excuse that you can’t bring it home because customs wont allow it. They don’t know how American customs work because they don’t get American visitors. They only know that Swedish people can buy spices and crappy perfume, they don’t know if it’s true or not that American people aren’t allowed to bring in spices through customs. To top it off, most Muslims don’t really care for American people.
Being from Portland also gives it a higher probability of being true, Portland has quite a lot of Swedish and Scandinavian inhabitants and when a guy said I looked Swedish I simply said that my grandparents are Swedish. My English is good enough to fool the people here, and if it isn’t – what do I care? If they figure out I’m lying to them, that will only work to my advantage. The lie is believable enough that they can’t call it out without calling me a liar (as opposed to being Japanese); to which I would of course be outraged and walk away. If they figure out I’m a liar and don’t call me out on it, they have two options: get upset or continue as normal. Continuing as normal is the worst case scenario because then I still have to fend them off further, if they get upset they can’t do anything but stop talking to me – which is exactly what I want!
When I walk around here, I can’t help to think that this is the exact opposite of Tokyo. Sure the sun is nice, but that’s it. That’s literally all that is nice here. I’m definitely not complaining, I quite like it, the sun and the beach is all I need to do what I came here to do. But if I was taking a real vacation, this would not be in my top pick. I miss Tokyo.
To say that my mood in this place is ambivalent is an understatement. Day one was actually quite a pain, missing internet and people. Day two was wonderful, getting some real sun, reading almost an entire book and getting much writing done, wrapping it up with minor internet-use, some coding and watching National Geographic (the only channel I have that isn’t dubbed to German).
Today, I miss family. Christmas isn’t a big thing for me, that’s why I’m here instead of celebrating. But I’ve never had a Christmas I didn’t spend with family before. The Muslims here put up almost as much Christmas-crap as the Christians to please the tourists, so you can’t really escape the season. Not that I really came here to escape either, it was just a coincidence. All the Christmas stuff just kind of reminds me even more about some of the things I do like about Christmas at home.
The quality of today has also fallen somewhat drastically compared to yesterday because I’ve been studying for my PADI Open Water diving certificate. I have to read a 250 page book in Danish (the English book wasn’t in and there was no Swedish) and watch about 4 hours of instructional video. Today I’ve read 130 pages and watched all the video. Hopefully I can get a hold of the English book tomorrow so the reading will go a bit faster but this day has been a complete “waste”. Sure diving and taking the certificate is real fun, but I didn’t come here to study :S
Why can’t I go anywhere in the world without having to study? Why do I constantly put myself into situations where I have to work?
Anyway, tomorrow I will start diving, looking forward to that. But since all divers use the “buddy system” I will need a buddy, and I have no idea if that’s going to be an instructor, someone else taking the course or what. I guess we’ll see. I hope it isn’t someone weird and that he/she can speak English acceptably well.
I don’t think the entire day tomorrow will be filled with diving stuff or studying though so hopefully I can return to my relaxed state of reading fiction and thinking.
Merry Christmas everyone, especially my family, I do miss you.
I’ve filled 5 or 6 pages of my Moleskine today. Mostly by what will be blogposts. Right now I want to get to bed though, so I’ll just post some pics from today. Thought I’d show you how I live and what it looks like here. I have also decided to take a diving certificate! Tomorrow I will start studying theory, then one shallow-water dive the day after tomorrow and then we go out 9-16 with the boat on Saturday, I think it’s gonna be pretty awesome :D
My bed
The bed I use for storage
My room from the outside.
Walking to the beach
The beach.
The sky
This is nice.
Dinner
There are many more pictures on
flickr. So just follow the
link to see them. They don’t really need any explanation. And I don’t want to post them all here because the internet connection is soo slow, and limited in time.
December 23rd,2009
Category | tags:
egypt,
hurghada |
2 Comments
