40 Days #4: Speed up working with themes and gamer pictures

One of the biggest money-making schemes on the Marketplace is the theme and gamer picture racket. At this point - over two years since the launch of the Xbox 360 - there are probably hundreds of themes and gamer picture packs, representing everything from games, movies, TV shows, anime, cartoon characters and more. Some are good, some are slutty, some of them make Monica frown when my profile loads. Many are badly designed, ugly, too expensive, too full of advertising, or just plain old weird. At any rate, there is a lot of choice.

Over time, you tend to accumulate a lot of these themes and gamer picture packs, since there are a lot of free ones, and who doesn't like to download something for free. I have a ton of these, many of which I never use, but I am too lazy to go and sort through them to clean them up. That and it takes way too much time to do anything that deals with themes or gamer pictures in the dashboard.

There are two main problems with both the theme and gamer picture sections of the dashboard: overall slowness and a lack of previews and metadata.

On the theme side, the slowness when you go into the theme list is almost crippling. I have about 25 themes on one of my consoles, and whenever I go to the theme listing to change the theme, the 360 almost freezes up. Even the little progress circle graphic looks like it's having a seizure, with the active dot jumping all over the circle instead of fluidly rotating around like it should. On a Windows PC this would be the point when the whole system gets so busy you can't click on anything else. I don't think enumerating 25 themes should bring the 360 - a pretty powerful system - to its knees like that. The dashboard developers should take a look at the Arcade game listing, which used to be awfully slow at enumerating your games too, but which has become much better with the last few updates.

The other annoyance is that some of the themes don't have the most descriptive of names, you don't see any sort of description metadata, and there is no way to preview what you are about to apply. I usually make sure that I move to one of the non-Marketplace blades where I can see a bit of background, so that when the new theme is applied I can see at least a bit of it. Sometimes that is not enough or I bring up the theme list on the Marketplace blade, so I have to quit out of the list, and look at the blades. Of course, then if I need to change the theme again, I have to yet again wait for the theme list to load.

The theme list "half-blade" should be expanded to a full-screen blade, where the right side could display the four graphics that make up the theme (either smaller and all at once, or large and rotating) and a bit of a description.

Similar problems exist in the gamer picture area. The listing takes way too long to load, before you can start scrolling through the pictures. Even then, each "page" of them takes some time to display the pictures instead of the empty placeholder boxes.

Once all your pictures load, you have to deal with the mess of seemingly disorganized images. For one thing, at least on a standard-def TV, some of the pictures are difficult to make out, so it's hard to tell exactly what you are looking at. Again, there are no descriptions - not even the name of the set the picture belongs to, something you can see on somebody's gamer card on the web, so that data is easily available. That information should be displayed somewhere when the picture is selected. Making the picture larger at that point - either on top of it, or somewhere on the side - would be very useful too.

Even worse is the fact that you can't sort the massive picture list (by, say, download date, picture set name, and so forth), and the default sort is very odd. It doesn't seem alphabetical, and it doesn't seem to be completely based on the download date either. Sure, newer pictures are somewhere near the bottom, but not always at the very end. That means that in order to find a particular picture you have to wait to load a long, disorganized list, in which you can't always easily see what you are selecting. Yay for user-friendly interfaces!

My last nitpick here lies with the relatively recently added ability to have both a public and a private picture. I hardly ever use the Vision camera to create a private picture, and I usually keep both of the pictures the same (especially since the gamer card in the dashboard shows your private picture). I think this would be a pretty common practice for many gamers, yet even this is not as easy to accomplish as it should be.

See, in my apparently not quite logical mind, it would make sense for there to be a quick and easy way to make one of the pictures the same as the other. I don't even need a dedicated button for it. There is a very simple and elegant way to do it - when I go into the list for either picture, load the other one near the top of the list (as the first or second item in the list). That way I can quickly select it and be done, instead of the current way, which forces me to yet again load the long list and fish out the picture from somewhere in the haystack. The ability to stick pictures at the top of the list clearly exists, since it happens if you click the guide button to change your picture right after downloading a new picture pack. At that point your new goodies are right up there, easy to find.

So make these personalization areas more efficient, and I might actually start buying some more themes and pictures apart from just downloading the usually crappy free ones.