The 20ft Interface

There are many programs out there that claim to have a 10ft interface.  A 10ft interface is supposed to be an interface that is usable up to 10ft away.  The problem with almost all 10ft interfaces, is that they aren't usable at 10ft.  There are really only usable up to 5ft.  At 10ft, you have to squint.  The text is so small that the interface really isn't usable.  This happens because the developers of the software had to fix so much content on the screen but it wouldn't all fix.  They ended up shrinking the text and content so that it would all fit in the screen.  This layout is still easier to use at a distance than a standard desktop pc layout, but is still pretty hard to use.  Therefore, I define a 10ft interface as an interface that is usable up to 5ft away.  Most DVR and HTPC/Media Center PC setups fall into this category.  This includes TiVo, Comcast DVR, FiOS DVR, MythTV, XBMC and Windows Media Center Edition.

One of the reasons I created my own HTPC software was because of the unusability of the 10ft interface.  I decided to create what I call a 20ft interface.  A 20ft interface is an interface that is usable up to 10ft away.  20ft interfaces have some advantages and disadvantages over the 10ft interface.  First, the 20ft interface doesn't require you to squint.  All the text is readable.  Choosing a movie or a tv show is very easy because you can clearly identify every title on the screen.  Also, the movie or show descriptions are readable.  So, if you are looking for a particular episode, you can do that without heading a headache.  The problem with the large text size is the fact that large bodies of text won't fit on the screen.  It is usually easy to edit movie and show descriptions to be smaller.  What is really hard is handling movie and show titles that are really long.  They tend to get clipped of screen.  I did make changes to the software to automatically shrink the text for long titles to a limit, but there is a lower size threshold.  This allows you to easily read most titles, but strain a little bit on the longer titles.  Below are screenshots of my FiOS box and my HTPC software:

Another disadvantage of the 20ft interface is the lack of eye candy.  You only have so much screen real estate.  When you make text really large, most of the screen is used for text.  This doesn't leave room for album covers or movie posters.  With a 20ft interface, you mostly only see text.  Some text is highlighted, and you move up/down to navigate.  This interface style isn't as nice as XBMC, but it does have the advantage of speed.

Without the eye candy, all you are rendering is text.  Text is easy to render.  This means the CPU and memory requirements for a 20ft interface are actually less than a 10ft interface with eye candy.  Many set top boxes are loaded with eye candy.  There are various images and icons inside of the menu system.  There are various widgets that run.  There is a lot of content.  That content contributes to the slow speed and the difficult nature to use from 10ft away.  It is a very hard leap to write functional interfaces that work at distances of 10ft or more.  The current TV developers can't learn from me because my interface cheats to a certain degree.  My HTPC actually has two interfaces.  The 20ft TV interface is used to select what you want to watch.  That is it.  You can't do anything else.  You can't configure it.  You can't schedule anything.  It is just for selecting what you want to watch.  The second interface is an integrated website.  All configuration is done in that website.  Set top box developers have to put their entire interface on the TV, while I don't.

There is a new generation of developers that are handling these problems today, they just don't know it yet.  Because of the strides they are making, and the designs that they are creating, I'm actually ditching my 20 FOOT interface for a 10 INCH interface.  That's right.  I'm building an Android TV!