I’m stuck in Windows again. I decided to go to the Netscape radio site, where I was the last time I was here. They had a nice little javascript player that loaded up RealPlayer and had a decent little interface to listen to internet radio stations. No better than the alternatives, but it worked, didn’t skip, and had a couple that I found decent enough to bear.
Anyway, go there this time and there’s no link and list of radio stations, but a note that there is a new player available, a real binary, not javascript. “Cool” I think to myself (the javascript player never worked under linux anyway). So I download and install it, and note with joy that no icons were put on my desktop (other than the actual program icon). Wow!
The player itself looks as advertised. I run it, select my station, and start listening. All fine so far. Then I decide to get some real work done and try to minimize it. This is what it did! Took up the bottom chunk of my screen like a big ugly fucking banner ad. You had to hit minimize again to get the thing to go into the task bar properly.
I can see the value of having the always on top, banner ad thing, if you want to have your music showing all the time, be able to change channels quickly, if there was a cool EQ or something, but make it an option that the user can choose knowing what they are choosing, don’t impose some new operation in place of what they expect, or else they are going to get pissed off at you!
I used to be a netscape zelot, but since they got bought up, like many people, I’m not overly impressed with the AOL treatment that netscape is getting.