Xbox One Insider Dashboard OS Previews [2017]

[BRiT]

Why did they remove it when that was one of the main advantages and unique features of the console's OS?

Because they were crucified for TV TV TV entertainment features. So they went chasing that performance gap for games.

Sometimes Snap was laggy but it would be corrected with a reboot. It was very functional and used religiously by a smaller subset of consumers. They pitched a replacement of Picture in Picture / Overlay mode from Win10 Core OS for some aspects but that fizzled out majorly. So now you have no replacement for it and left with a lesser experience that has to be crutched through using a second device like tablet or PC.

 

[Rockster]

Interesting. Sounds like achievement tracking, broadcasting, and background audio are now handled via overlays or the guide rather than snap, so primary remaining use case without equivalent workaround is watching video whilst playing a game? I suppose if that's a must, some TV's with proper PIP support might get you there. Looks like a neat feature though, one that says to me, look at what we can do rather than should they. Based on an interview I found with Mike Ybarra regarding this, he says they've prioritized performance now over this underutilized feature to reclaim its memory and cpu reservation. As you said, moving focus from entertainment back to gaming. He also mentioned that because of the shift to UWP apps, most devs were removing this functionality from their applications anyway making the decision easier. Directed those that want it back to upvote it on their uservoice site.

 

[AzBat]

Interesting. Sounds like achievement tracking, broadcasting, and background audio are now handled via overlays or the guide rather than snap, so primary remaining use case without equivalent workaround is watching video whilst playing a game? I suppose if that's a must, some TV's with proper PIP support might get you there. Looks like a neat feature though, one that says to me, look at what we can do rather than should they. Based on an interview I found with Mike Ybarra regarding this, he says they've prioritized performance now over this underutilized feature to reclaim its memory and cpu reservation. As you said, moving focus from entertainment back to gaming. He also mentioned that because of the shift to UWP apps, most devs were removing this functionality from their applications anyway making the decision easier. Directed those that want it back to upvote it on their uservoice site.

Yeah sounds like another user who never used it. Had you, then you'd understand why it was more useful. Achievement tracking sucks compared to the new overlay. You can only track 4 or 5 now & don't get to see descriptions. You also can't use the TrueAchievment app that could snap to help you with user suggestions. On the NFL & ESPN apps you could snap live games or snap live scoreboards or your fantasy football league. On Skype you could snap video chat while you played games or watch movies or TV. Overlay is a poor replacement. Snap was a major feature sold to many who bought the system over a competitor who didn't have the feature. If I wanted that system I would have bought it. Now I have a system thats no better. Until you had used it, I don't feel anybody can argue that what we have is better.

Tommy McClain

 

[BRiT]

Just to add on a bit to what AzBat summed up...

What we have now is a sad set of items designed by people who never used Snap and never understood what the real functionality was.

 

[Jay]

The impression i get is once again they have all these stats and telemetry yet interpret them badly.

was usage of snap low because people wasn't interested in it or due to its performance?
as they said it was removed due to performance but wasn't used anyway.

i just find it crazy they have HDMI in, PiP functionality, but yet people have to vote to get them to implement PiP for HDMI in. Which i have little faith in.
also on 1X the HDMI in doesn't pass through 4K, reminds me of the psvr breakout box.

thinking about it, wonder if a uwp app could be written to do HDMI in PiP.

 

[BRiT]

I wish there was an AVR that allowed for controllable PIP functionality. But even with that, you're getting a limited functionality experience. You need being able to switch control to the other app/video source, which means having to switch physical controllers, like from game controller to secondary remote etc. Unless you can voice control the secondary device completely, its going to be worse off experience.

This is my second biggest disappointment from them. The first is their complete lack of using Kinect (or xbox one S) IR blasting hardware to be THE UNIVERSAL Remote. Integrate in with the IR database and custom macros and setup then mix in Cortana and you have a Harmony/Alexa killer.

So much potential wasted.

 

[Rockster]

Clearly I hit a sore spot here. Sorry, that wasn't my intent. Actually just trying to get a better appreciation for it. Like I said, it sounds really cool. But while I think they had great intentions, they also maybe underestimated the system resources necessary for it to work well. All the current gen consoles are woefully underpowered cpu wise relative to modern PC's and so getting those apps to perform even moderately well within that reservation seems like a stretch. Particularly when paying a virtual machine tax on top because of how Xbox OS is implemented. I did watch a couple youtube videos and read this reddit of others also wanting snap back ...

https://www.reddit.com/r/path%3D%252Fr%252Fxboxone%252Fcomments%252F6y8x22%252F

... but as much as they like the capabilities it provided in promise, by their own admission it didn't truly work particularly well. Its unfortunate they weren't able to make it work better to improve its adoption.

I was clearly in the minority also when I supported their initial idea of digital only - online required, for the scenarios it would enable, but that ultimately was 86'd also. I've come to the conclusion that the only way to get what we want is to do our own. Perhaps we should all unite to develop the B3D console, which we could design to properly support snap and be 100% DRM restricted. There are some good hw design proposals over in the next gen thread. Though our console would probably get fairly pricy based on what we want to see powering it.

 

[Rockster]

HDMI in, wasn't for Snap or PIP. They did that to prevent users from having to switch TV inputs and therefore the Xbox UI could always be present over any activity, be it watch normal TV, etc. Users would then see when friends come online, or chat, etc. Without HDMI in, receiving and responding to those notifications, and maintaining that level of engagement isn't possible. You're doing one thing or the other.

 

[BRiT]

It always worked amazingly well for me. The only lag hiccups were cured from a reboot. And then the only slowness/lag I saw was when swapping between game and snap. Once you had it setup and running in the snap pane then ESPN/NFL/TV/TrueAchievements/Skype was solid performance even with limited resources.

They did have frame display pacing issues with 50Hz HDMI Input in Snap mode now and then with certain dashboard versions. But I always had 60Hz sources.

 

[Scott_Arm]

I liked the idea of snapping apps, but in practice I never had a reason to use it. I played around with it at launch, and it was terribly clunky. Picture in picture video is just about the only application for snap that was worthwhile, but I think the number of people interested in using it was miniscule. For most apps fast switching between fullscreen apps is a better solution. I remember that dev kit leak and there were all kinds of considerations that game devs had to make depending on whether their game was full screen, windowed on the home screen or having an app snapped. Overall the complication was just not worth it. It's never good to lose features, but the implementation was a bit of a mess and gamers didn't want it.

 

[BRiT]

Speaking of which, the last dashboard update that went public (Summer version?) removed the updating live tile "windowed on the home screen" for games and apps. When a program is in that mode, the tile on the home screen is static image of the game, same as displayed in the My Games and Apps list section. That was done so more (all?) of the cpu and gpu would be used for the dashboard. So many features were removed in the chase of performance. If only they didnt cheap out on the hardware to begin with they wouldnt have had to backpedal on their implimentations.

 

[AzBat]

Like Brit said I never had any problems with performance of Snap. So I don't understand the complaints about it being slow. I think what people don't understand is that the interface for Snap was meant to be done solely with voice using Kinect. When they decided to no longer require Kinect they had to try bolt on a controller interface to use it & they never really got one that worked well. Their nerf of that experience eventually led to it's downfall.

Tommy McClain

 

[Jay]

I liked the idea of snapping apps, but in practice I never had a reason to use it. I played around with it at launch, and it was terribly clunky. Picture in picture video is just about the only application for snap that was worthwhile, but I think the number of people interested in using it was miniscule. For most apps fast switching between fullscreen apps is a better solution. I remember that dev kit leak and there were all kinds of considerations that game devs had to make depending on whether their game was full screen, windowed on the home screen or having an app snapped. Overall the complication was just not worth it. It's never good to lose features, but the implementation was a bit of a mess and gamers didn't want it.

This was pretty much the point I was making.
You played with it, but it didn't work well.
PiP was what was most worth while for you, but they haven't even implemented it back.
Your last point, is it that gamers didn't want it, or in my view that when they tried it a few times it didn't work well, so then didn't use it.

PiP obviously can be done otherwise they wouldn't have said vote for it, unless their just out right lying about being able to put it back in without impacting performance.

Snap's gone, but there's certain things where they threw the baby out with the bath water.

 

[Scott_Arm]

PiP was actually not worthwhile for me at all. It's just the one use case I can imagine being used. Most apps require input, so there's no reason I can think of to keep them snapped at the side of the screen. A video playing (twitch, skype, tv) makes sense to me. Snap seems like a feature that was designed around very limited use cases.

The Xbox OS at launch was pretty half-baked. The first impression for most people was bad. It relied a lot on voice control, which I liked but most people hated. The dev environment for apps was not ready at all. The quality of the apps was poor. The responsiveness of the overall OS relative to a smartphone was not good. To be brutally honest, even now, it's just easier to do most things on my phone while i'm using my xbox, and I can't see how they could ever make the console experience with snapped apps even in the same ballpark.

What they needed to do was have a full-fledged application environment where you could switch between applications very quickly, in full screen, like I can on my phone. THats the only way it could have worked well. They could have had a button on the controller that functioned like alt-tab, and you could press it to cycle through your running apps. Of course, all of that would be expensive, because it would require more RAM and a faster drive.

Input is also one of the main issues of apps on the console. Inputting text on a gamepad sucks. Sure, you can buy the chatpad accessory, or hook up a wired keyboard if your tv is close enough (because they didn't include bluetooth ...), but if apps a key aspect of the experience then the chatpad should have been included as part of every controller.

That's a long-winded way of saying the Xbox One was poorly built for any real use of applications, so it's no surprise that the app experience has taken a back seat for now, and that features like snap have disappeared. If they can add PiP video without performance issues, then great, but they're probably better of focusing on the responsiveness of the OS and game performance, which is something more people will appreciate.

Now they're finally seeming to support mouse and keyboard. Maybe they'll get it right with Xbox Two.

 

[Jay]

I agree with pretty much everything you have to say regarding everything about the XO not being ready.

The funny thing is, it was more ready as a games console than a multi-media device that it was being touted as.
People who may have wanted a media device that's a good console, well they wouldn't have bought it because it lacked all the media device functionality that they even had on the x360.

I'm not saying the focus should've been media, far from it, I'm saying that the USP's and good things about the XO they have been throwing out thinking no one wanted it, when the fact is they never worked well to begin with. That's why they wasn't used as much.

If they had focused on releasing as a console (with the same hardware but not bundled with kinect), then develop and roll in the media functionality into the OS, they would have faired a lot better. They launched with an OS that was missing too many things, and didn't work as a media device, and wasn't as solid as could have been for a console.

So their removing things, instead of adding as time has gone on like the x360.

When snap was taken away, many people just assumed overlay would be used for some of the things like hdmi-in PiP and it wasn't. I'm not saying that snap whole sale should come back as they have shown that there are other ways to do things like achievements.
With PiP could have hdmi-in, streams, youtube, walk throughs, etc.

 

[Scott_Arm]

There focus right now definitely seems to be streamlining the OS and functionality, despite disagreements about whether the new ui is an improvement in usability. My personal point of view is that the hardware they released is not capable of providing the multi-tasking app environment they promised without compromises to games. So what they've done is stripped everything back to focus on games, which is what the vast majority of people seem to want. In theory, I'm sure they could provide PiP, but I have no idea what the implications of that would be. You'd at a bare minimum be running some reduced version of youtube, netflix or other media app concurrently with your game. I don't think that comes for free.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

With hardware h.264 decoding on the GPU, doing nothing in game, the overhead of internet video streaming should be minimal. There's also the video compositing hardware for overlays eliminating that overhead.

 

[AzBat]

My personal point of view is that the hardware they released is not capable of providing the multi-tasking app environment they promised without compromises to games.

It worked fine thank you very much. The hardware is plenty capable. They had the right hardware & OS reservations to handle it. They decided to remove Snap for the benefit of background music, Cortana & Mixer & HD recording not games. Remove those which are also not game required features & Snap will run plenty fine. There are only a few apps that make Snap worthwhile & neither of them are very demanding hardware wise.

Tommy McClain

 

[iroboto]

I didn't notice this since I've not bought disc in a while.
But while installing a new game and downloading a patch, it shows you the progress of both the installation and the download at the same time
reads as
Disc: 0.99 GB of 30 GB
Internet: 0.5GB of 6 GB 30 Mb/s

 

[AzBat]

Anybody try out the new light theme yet? It was just enabled about 2 hours ago for Alpha members. Will be nice to try out when I get home. Yeah, new features are getting harder to get excited about. What's left from what was announced at E3?

Tommy McClain