On set-top box remotes»
Revisiting some “work” I did during the school year. Henry Holtzman offered to pay me around minimum wage to fiddle with set-top boxes and write about them. I bit.
It was a fun distraction from problem sets. And I enjoyed donning my tech columnist hat. I think middle school Ethan would have been proud. But frankly, most of the writing was banal. And I can only go through so many Netflix registration interfaces. Maybe I’ll revisit these guys some day. I hear Google might be ramping up their game. Doing a genuine usability study with some people off the street would be a hoot.
Either way, I think this particular piece is salvageable and at least moderately interesting. And dragging the images around on the page is just too fun.
Reinventing the TV remote is a tricky design problem. If you can’t tell from the writeup, I’m pretty heavily biased toward the Boxee remote. But I think they made a fundamental mistake in making the front face vertically symmetric. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve accidentally held that bad boy upside down.
Oh well. Baby steps. Americans and their TVs.
