Expectations of a Software Developer

You know, it’s funny. Time Warner recently pushed a new update to it’s customers which by all conventional wisdom should be a good thing. It is however, not.

The new guide, named “Mystro” is like a newborn struggling to breath at this point. Last night my wife and I were watching “Max” with John Cusak and for the life of me I couldn’t remember Max’s last name. Popping open the information panel for the current movie should’ve told me who he was, maybe even showed me an IMDB page from the movie for all the info I could ever hope to want. That is what I expected in a new guide.

Instead, functionality that used to be in the guide isn’t anywhere to be found. There are two completely different menus now as well, one “Menu” and one “Guide.” However it’s interesting to point out that the “Menu” includes categorized groupings of channels by topic or type, whereas the “Guide” is just a:

menu - Choices and commands that are displayed on the screen and can be selected by the user. —Cornell

Interesting.

“guide” - A guide is a person who leads people through unknown or unmapped country, or conducts travellers and tourists through a place of interest. — Wikipedia

Basically the new guide starts with this sort of mis-labeling and just keeps on rolling. The PIP functionality is nowhere near as good as it was in the previous software, including a single subwindow instead of the choice of two sizes in windows.

For some reason, in Mystro-World the canonical numbering system somehow goes from 13 to 284, to 301 with 285 only reachable by entering the number manually. “Guide” indeed.

I recently got so irate with it that I logged on to TWC.com to get some live chat going. I asked the representative if TWC had set up a forum for customers to air their criticisms of the new software. After 25 minutes, and the rep “resetting” my cable box; I was told that there is no forum, and that there is no email address to which to send complaints.

Maybe it’s time for some grass-roots action? Or maybe I should just switch to the dish.