Media Center supports this idea of Background Add-Ins, these are programs that run as part of Media Center; there are lots of good scenarios enabled by these, for example the following Media Center add-ins are background add-ins:
· Position Changer – While media is playing the add-in listens for a sequence of remote keys to determine at what point in the playing media to navigate to.
· Add-In Launcher – Listens for a sequence of remote keys and maps those to add-ins which in turn are invoked.
There are other usages for background add-ins as well, for example one might listen for folder changes and when they are detected invoke some media center specific experience associated with that folder change possibly related to indexing the new content.
As you can see this concept is very powerful, in essence its these background add-ins that it make it possible for third-parties to approximate a experience that is as integrated as a native Media Center one.
One key element is missing though, the ability to have a minimally invasive user experience interact with the user to provide a visual confirmation of the background add-ins interaction with the user.
There are a couple of examples I have come across in the past two weeks where this would be useful, these include:
1. Position Changer/Add-In Launcher – These two add-ins would benefit from a mini-guide like experience that when a key press was received and processed by these add-ins it would be echoed to the screen so the user would know their request was being listened too.
2. Folder Indexing Add-In – A Add-in that indexes content (this can be time consuming) would benefit from having some user interface that could show the progress of the indexing. Imagine a dialog that says, new content has been detected indexing showing a progress bar, this would be much like in Media Center’s own progress bar dialog shown when it is indexing content, it would be able to be dismissed but the indexing would run slower as a background task.
The problem is that for various reasons none of the above is possible today, these background add-ins need to invoke their complete (full screen) experience vs. just popping a layer above the existing experience.
The basic rational behind this is surely related to the broad usability of the Media Center experience, you wouldn’t want drive-by-pop ups like we get today on the Internet but this does leave the scenarios I mention wanting from a user experience standpoint as a result.
Oh well, just thought I would share my findings,