Yesterday I decided to try some Zune HD apps from third party developers, but it ended up in some deep disappointments towards Microsoft.
After I had installed Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 and XNA game studio 3.1 I was able to load some third party apps on my Zune HD I got from zhdapps.com. I had the first app running and everything seemed fine, until I wanted to go back to the main menu. My Zune HD restarted itself.
I knew that back when the XNA Game Studio 3.0 made it possible to play games on my Zune 30 it needed to restart itself every time you closed the game, but finding out that this limitation was still present on the Zune HD made me deeply disappointed in Microsoft.
Even the reason for this given by the ZHDapps.com FAQ couldn’t satisfy me:
“Your Zune restarting is normal and it is done so you don’t crack DRM encryption on the music. This is a preventative step put in place by Microsoft and does not harm your Zune what-so-ever. Just think of it as keeping you safe.”
Why can’t a big software company like Microsoft come up with another solution than just letting your Zune restart?
This got me thinking. What’s the point of having the possibility to code games and apps for the Zune HD, but not giving developers the opportunity to put their games in a marketplace?
Zune Marketing Manager Brian Seitz said the Zune Team isn’t working on an app platform because they didn’t want to overlap the Windows Mobile team. I can understand that, you shouldn’t work separately on similar thing that don’t work together, instead the two teams should actively be working on that together.
I feel like Microsoft doesn’t know who it’s competing against.
If the Zune HD is meant to compete with the Apple iPod Touch, the Zune Team should release a full SDK for the Zune HD (XNA has too many limitations, like the inability to make internet access) and make an open application marketplace.
If the Zune HD is only targeting the niche-market of non-iPod mp3 players, than a full SDK or app marketplace isn’t necessary.
Come on, Microsoft, I know you can do it!
Who is Microsoft competing with?
Korneel De Feyter on January 18th 2010, 19:00Spare yourself some pain and don’t choose for the “Items I choose” sync option
Korneel De Feyter on November 14th 2009, 22:10When I bought my Zune 120 a year ago, I came up with the idea to make a playlist where I would put all of the music I wanted on my Zune in. That saved me a lot of time when switching to my Zune HD as my daily player. So when I got my Zune HD I just dragged that playlist (I called it Korneel, a very original choice) onto my ZHD through the Zune Software. I have about 22 Gigabytes of music, so syncing does take some time.
I went to bed and the next morning all my music was synced. So far so good.
But today, four days later, I experienced that choosing the sync option “Items I choose” was a very bad move. The “Items I choose” option comes down to this: everything that’s in your Zune Software collection will be synced to your Zune. If something disappears from your hard drive and the Zune software notices, it will be removed from your Zune. So because I have such a big music collection, I store all those files on an external hard drive.
Also my playlists were stored on that drive.
So what happened today? For some reason my external hard drive lost the connection with my PC. I was recharging my Zune and the ‘Software was running. The ‘Software noticed my Korneel-playlist was gone so it deleted all my music, except for two albums from my Zune. Only ‘Flaming Pie’ by Paul McCartney and ‘Songs’ by Admiral Freebee are left.
So if you want to spare yourself some pain, go to settings > device > sync option and make sure you have selected the right sync option. I find ‘Manual sync’ the best option, but that’s up to you…