So far (one year later) I’m pretty non-plussed with Adobe Media Player. It reminds me too much of Real / WMP which means I must not be the target market, or I’m just old and cranky. The source of much of my irritation has been that it launches at startup and I don’t remember giving it permission to. Regardless, every time I reboot (admittedly infrequent on OS X) I’m confronted with a slow starting app (AMP) and I can’t figure out where startup preferences are that would stop this.
Just today, I decided to again nose around in the “options” and discovered that launch at startup is actually tucked away under a category called “Automatic Notifications”.
Whether in the iPhone, RIAs, or new age desktop apps, motion patterns are all the rage. I dig this and I’m a big advocate for pushing the boundaries of usability and user / brand experience, but at the end of the day some of AMP’s animations don’t add much value for me and end up feeling gratuitous. This contributes to a sense of bloat and “fakeness” in the app which is also part of the “brand experience” that’s often not accounted for.
There’s lots to like it in AMP (rss playlists, file system playback of flv, etc.), but there’s also a disturbing sense of bloat (it sometimes feels like a big advert to me), a slick, but gratuitous, ui which reinforces emotional unease and an overall lack of concern for user control (launch at boot up). Add it all up and it makes me feel like AMP is just more of the same in the media player market.
11 Comments
The mom of the dude who worked on AMP doesn’t even like it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDg6rh7Sue8
@PK - ROFL. God damn I hope they put you up on stage for a keynote at MAX…
Hi Brooks,
great job you’ve done explaining how to prevent Adobe Media Player from starting at with system startup process. I nearly went crazy about that and it forced me do not use the application for weeks. Nobody could have explained it better than you I Adobe should hire you. I still don’t understand why Adobe is calling options what generations of developers called preferences.
thx again
MACsCOOL
Thanks for the kind words. The preferences vs options decision is indeed perplexing. I think everyone has been scratching their heads a bit about some of the UI decisions (somewhere someone is really bitter about all of the armchair designers out there). ;-)
Man o man… I agree; this one flew over the top of the heads of the people designing the flow of this program… I would have never guessed looking in there; I did see it but my brain never said; Oh let’s click in there maybe it is hidden in the AUTOMATIC NOTIFICATIONS section… Makes me want to go back and check the PERFORMANCE section and see what they have in there… Anyway, thanks so much for relieving my frustration…
I use Windows XP and just msconfiged it away:) You are totally right, sometimes it´s really anoying that there are so much ad´s a note´s that are enough to read it once and not every time you lunch it. The reason why I use it is that it´s just beautiful and the quality is great.
I suffered the same agony as you with Adobe Media Player. Thank you so much for posting the fix on the internet.
On Windows, even if you deleted the damn thing from the “Startup” folder, it would put itself back in on reboot. Who would want this thing to launch on startup? I was about to uninstall until I saw this
Thanks for the great explanation. I was cursing the damn app and thinking to chuck it, except for some shows I wanted to see. Appreciate the info and hope Adobe gets their act together with this option. Very tricky dicky.
Thank you. This AMP is truly “fat and sassy”, as a choreographer I once knew from Tennessee would often say. This kind of marketing actually restricts one’s internet experience in the guise of broadening the user’s horizons. It’s also a blatant money grab; which is evil on all levels of programming and life in general. We can only hope that Dante is quickly scribing new circles of hell for the likes of the AMP marketers to reside in. Thanks so much for pointing out the “oh, so not convenient” preference that enables the user to disable what any self respecting programmer should have never enabled in the first place. Too bad, if it wasn’t for all the capitalist bloat the viewer would probably be one of the better ones on the market.
Thank you, thank you, thank you! Thanks for the simple explanation and the detailed graphics…I was about to trash this program until I found this site. It’s really annoying having AMP pop up when I don’t want it to! Seriously, Adobe should hire you.
I shall be forwarding this info to a couple of friends and I shall be bookmarking your blog.
Thanks again! You rock!
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