Our mother company Fluendo will be at Computex, happening June 1st to 5th 2010 in Taiwan, to present Moovida Immersed, the media center interface we’ve been talking so much about.

To arrange a meeting and experience the Immersed interface before anyone else, contact Fluendo at sales@fluendo.com.

Facelifts come under many forms, and we’re not talking about the kind with the painful swelling. In our case, the Moovida web facelift was long overdue, and hopefully with this site, newbies to Moovida will have a good first impression from the moment they visit our homepage. Moovida’s UI has been a strong point for us and now we have a website design to make it proud!

So please, go ahead and enjoy Moovida’s new web, and don’t forget to tell your friends about us… (hint: the “Share This” link below makes it easy for you).

Who isn’t a fan of Christopher Columbus? You know, the guy who rediscovered a continent abundant in natural resources and allowed a herd of shady Europeans to start over in the land of opportunity? Granted he only achieved this by getting lost, but still, the guy has some merit.

Wondering where I’m going with this? Well, you too could be the pioneer of unchartered territories by joining Moovida’s beta tester program. Ok, maybe I’m going a little “overboard” with this analogy, but if you’re fan of Moovida and want to be the first to experience new content and features, joining the beta tester program is the best way to go. Get all excitement minus the sea sickness and tuberculosis.

The goal of the program is to get plugins and features to Moovida users faster, so by becoming a beta tester you actually contribute to the greater good of Moovidamankind. It’s easy to join, all you need to do is:

1) create an account with Launchpad

2) sign up to Moovida’s beta tester group on Launchpad

3) subscribe to the group’s mailing list

4) get the instructions by email which explain how to get the beta content and make bug reports (alert! there are mildly geeky concepts involved here so make sure you are familiar with changing values in Moovida’s configuration file)

5) get cracking!

The group is open to anyone, and we’ll be contacting members to test specific topics on an ongoing basis. All we ask from beta testers’ is that they know Moovida well (as in power user) and file complete and easy to reproduce bug reports. If you’re not sure how, get some practice first by trying to find inconsistencies with Moovida’s current version, and file your bug report here. Our QA Team will let you know if there is missing information to confirm the bug.

So what next? Moovida beta testers’ first assignment is to check out the newest Wearehunted plugin, developed by steadfast Moovida community member Michal Sawicz. Don’t hesitate to tell your friends about the program, the more the merrier.

Happy testing!

It was with a slight smirk in the Fluendo offices as the Moovida team looked at the latest 3.0 update to Apple’s ‘Hobby’ project the AppleTV. What caused us to smile was the new changes to their ‘Main Menu’ with Apple declaring that it ”…features a simpler and faster interface that gives you instant access to your favorite content” [1]. Haven’t we seen this somewhere before and came to the same conclusion?

It is interesting to see someone like Apple struggle with the complexities of a media center and despite its ‘hobby’ status it stands out as one of the poorest products in their inventory. How do you transport desktop features and methodology to a TV set and offer a simple interface that everyone can understand and find easy to use? Apple is failing at this. Some of the Moovida team has been doing this media center gig for nearly ten years and we feel we have the answers. We have been wrestling with interface ideas and that healthy balance of power versus simplicity as we continually ask ourselves that very question. I feel we are getting it right and on the verge of making it even better.

When Moovida replaced Elisa, we redesigned our Main Menu. The reason for this was to remove clicks, to make the experience as speedy and intuitive as possible and more importantly put a real emphasis on ’simpler and faster’. In fact, at the time I highlighted the AppleTV as a shining example of what NOT to do! (hey, I don’t like everything Apple does!). However, Apple updated their Main Menu and in effect ‘borrowed’ one of the key aspects that make our media center so much more intuitive. Is Apple following in our footsteps? In many ways they are, but in a smug way it is nice to see a ‘competitor’ as big as Apple trailing behind us and yet still not achieving the level of user experience standard we feel Moovida offers (but maybe we’re just full of ourselves?).

Still, the good thing about our project being open source is, we have the chance to move faster and more importantly for us, it isn’t a hobby!

[1] Apple Introduces Apple Tv 3.0 Software With Redesigned User Interface – Eddy Cue VP of Internet Services: http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2009/10/29appletv.html