I did four things this weekend - (1) I read some comments on blogs regarding what people thought Information Center was (and their expectations),  (2) did a fair amount of usability testing, (3) wrote alot of code, and (4) consumed more diet coke than any individual should in a 48 hour period.

I've had feedback from alot of people both direct and through comments I've read on various sites, that they'd really like to be able to use this for more than just technology blogs / podcasts. There were *alot* of people who said they'd like a new tool to manage their podcasts specifically.  I listened and I made some significant changes such that I think this is going to meet expectations. You'll see in the screenshots below sites that are distinctly non-technical, like NBC's Meet The Press and YouTube's Top Rated feeds. You'll also notice the guide now lists *alot* of non-technical categories. Alot of people were asking for this, so I rolled this in as a core feature in the first CTP vs. delivering it later on. 

I've totally overhauled the UI, and for the first time since Information Center's inception, I'm really happy with it. One challenge was in providing as good as an experience for text based content (standard blogs) as media, the other was integrating subscriptions, subscribing, sharing, and mixing in such a way as it was intuitive. I really think the UI is finally there. I've taken a number of screenshots from my testing today and have placed them below so you can see for yourself.

In addition, you'll notice there are graphics for the blogs that are there.  Where are these coming from?  Images will be pulled from the relevant tags for the channel in core RSS (seen in my blog below), iTunes extensions (seen in Meet The Press and MajorNelson.com), or NewsGator extensions (seen in Channel 9).  For those sites that do not specify a channel graphic, it will go to a default (see YouTube below)

I also had a fair amount of comments around the browsing window. Specifically "What if I want to watch the video in a bigger window?"  What's not visible in the screenshots - but it's there, I swear - is a slider.  The upper section (video/blog description, image, description) and the list of items are on two separate panels. You can extend either as much as you'd like. Once you click on an item, it determines you current window size and resizes the embedded media player appropriately. You'll also note that the video/blog area is large in general.  This works out particularly well for text blogs, as you can extend to the full screen to read.

I've also been building out a tool behind the scenes which I call FeedCenter/FeedStation, which is helping me manage all of the feeds behind the scenes as well.

So - if you've ever done consulting or project management, you're familiar with the trade-off triangle. For those unfamiliar, you have time, resources and features and impacts to one area have carry on effects on others.  In this case, the UI has been re-done and locked down and this can be used for lot's on non-tech content much easier now - but it's pushed this back a few days more.

This is a slow week at the office, so should be able to freely crank this out in the evenings and turn it around soon.

Please keep those comments coming - mmercuri@microsoft.com - as you can see by the accelerated inclusion of non-tech content, I really do listen

Cheers,

Marc