Be Excellent To Each Other

There is a new dashboard just gone live.

New features:
Heavy pushing of Kinect at every chance. Kinect compatibility for navigating the dash.
Better audio for voice chat (not tried it yet).
The default dash location when you boot it is "my xbox", so when you boot to dash, you are just a single button press from booting the disc. Instead of having to go up then press a button.
UI overhaul which I like, but I could see some people disliking.
Slightly modified boot animation (I bet focus groups said making everything iPod coloured was better for the casuals).

What do y'all think of it?

Haven't switched it on yet but I'm really looking forward to trying the updated voicechat codec! (Man, I'm lame.)

I shall set it updating whilst I shower.

I look forward to Wednesday when I'll be online for the first time in aaaaages. My Gold membership has elapsed though. Will that matter?

Mine is updating now and it's doing it pretty quickly!

I too am looking forward to trying the voice chat.

Apart from that.. nice colours so far!

Oh great.. it's teaching me how to use the controller.

What does A do again?

Oh yeah, the update thing is super fast, like 2 minutes tops maybe.

Makes the PS3 looks even slower, it takes like ten times longer for an update that is literally just removing functionality.

I don't suppose the new dashboard signs in any quicker? Mine seems to take a while these days.

In the absence Dimrill,

Oh yeah, the update thing is super fast, like 2 minutes tops maybe.

@LewieP I see on Twitter you say that your Xbox signs in and goes straight to the game that is in the drive option... Mine doesn't. It still goes to the spotlight section.

I wonder if there's an option to change this?

You need to hide the "welcome" thing, like when the NXE came out, then it should take you to My Xbox (and everything else is off to the right).

Or at least that's what I did.

I don't think that picking apart people's words is being excellent.

I've hidden the welcome note but it still goes to the spotlight section. I think I need to mess a bit more.

But so far.. I like the overhaul. The "recent games" section seems to load a lot quicker so far. Before, mine would take ages sometimes.

Also, it's weird scrolling through your friends list now. It looks quite strange as they're all flat rather than the one behind being.. well.. slightly behind.

Hmmm... It's asking me to download SkyPlayer again.

Apparently you need to go into download history and redownload from there.

When did people on this forum start turning so bloody sensitive?

We've all switched shaving techniques. Give us a bit of time.

Also:

So I finish my shower, and can hear bright, inoffensive music wafting from downstairs.

Oh look, a really patronizing yet simplistic and uninformative (basics doesn't begin to describe it) 'tutorial'.

And then when you try to sign into Live, the Terms Of Use pop up and it DOESN'T handhold you and tell you that you need to use the RIGHT stick (nothing else!) to scroll the text.

And now... everything looks like the new, ugly 'swoosh' design we first saw on the Crackdown 2 box. Your menu options don't disappear into the distance any more, nor do your friends. The pointless mist obscuring the bottom half of the background is still there, rendering any old themes you may have enjoyed even more worthless than they were (as the new way the menus move ensure most of it is now blocked). I liked being able to see five or six menu options ahead, as opposed to the three and a fraction you now can. Certainly on the Inside Xbox tab you no longer can catch a glimpse of something interest buried further down the list, you actively have to go looking through them for goodness.

Your recent games list seems to load faster (THANK FUCK) but go into your video library! After you've downloaded a huge update, agreed to more terms, look at any videos you have stored on the hard drive. They're not displayed in a list any more, but a collection of huge, ugly, blurry icons that you have to scroll through one at a time. This is no doubt to accomodate the Kinect's means of navigating menus.

So... I don't really like it. In fact, I'd almost be tempted to say it looks like a beta version (complete with placeholder graphics) for the 'old' NXE dashboard!

I don't think it's being overly sensitive. I'm dyslexic, and I probably make a bunch of grammatical error's and such fairly frequently, and I'd get sick of it if I were corrected every bloody time.

Or should I get someone to proof read it every time I want to post?

Meaty in "doesn't like new stuff" shocker

I'm having to re-download everything. Sky Player, Last FM, Zune.

But they're not taking too long and everything does look nice.. apart from the creepy and tall avatars.

There wasn't a single grammatical error in what you wrote. It was constructed flawlessly. It did sound like it was written by a 14-year old American girl though. Hence the 'In the absence of Dimrill' comment.

Wait til you see it! Some good ideas are totally swamped by the amateurish (not 'minimalist') look of it all. It's actually harder to navigate stuff, especially the friends list.

I don't see why we should have the goodness of NXE skanked up for the sake of Kinect. Or how about this - let us choose to retain a joypad-oriented interface instead?

Oh. I was wrong about the new Xbox dash. It is still defaulting to "Spotlight", not "My Xbox". That should be fixed really.

That will never be fixed. They want you to see their ads, even if you can now only see the first three of them.

I thought as much... oh well..

The VideoKinect thing looks pretty neat. Video chat that users the Kinect or the Xbox live vision camera. It also has messenger on there but since I don't know anyone that uses it.. I'll stay forever signed out.

Very much this. From Microsoft's perspective, it's not broken.

Live Messenger has been well integrated since NXE, if you have the Chatpad it's quite cool as you can pop up a little chat window of the bottom of the screen in-game instead of having to bring up the Guide, and can chat away while playing.

Of course, the problem arises when you're trying to play something fastpaced and people keep messaging you.

This reminds me, a big test will be to see how quickly the Guide now pops up in certain game situations... sometimes you hit Guide and it works at a dead slug's pace.

I'm sure the live messenger feature is great, and it does interest me, but I don't know anyone on there and haven't signed in to mine for years.

Guess it'll stay that way.

TOP TIP: Go and check your settings for things you might have adjusted once and then forgotten about. For example, I had the music player volume set to max (as we like blasting the house down when in the kitchen) but the update reset it to 50%. And try not to laugh at the rubbish new 'shuffle' icon.

It's... ok.

It looks half finished somehow. Not sure they had to change it so much to make it work with Kinect either.

I get the feeling that everything is now huge (like your head, etc) and also no longer overlaps other elements so it's easier for Kinect to tell what you're gesturing at.

Hmm... maybe. Does everything have to be so squa.... figured it in the middle of the sentence. It matches Windows Phone 7.

Has anyone tried the voice comms yet?

Aye, I thought it looked a bit more zuney.

I've just tried the voice comms with my friend and we were crystal clear.

We never had any issues before, but now it sounds... well.. less like we're talking on the phone if you know what I mean?

Looks like kinect video chat works with the original 360 webcam, which is nice. I wonder if it supports my usb wii ambient mic, or multiple headsets from multiple controllers, like it hasn't up to now.

The main thing for me is the games lists, waiting half an hour for my arcade games or recently played titles to come up has been profoundly annoying, ditto those small gaps in play on the likes of Halo where you want to check if anyone's online and invite them and the guide takes an age to appear. Hopefully that's sorted.

I'm pretty sure the xbox goes straight to the My Xbox section if you're offline.

aye, that's it.

But I want to be online.

I suppose I wouldn't mind it defaulting to the spotlight when there's something new in there, and only on boot. But it doesn't, it takes me back to the same stuff I've already seen or decided to ignore. I do want to be nudged a small amount towards new stuff from time to time, it's a benefit of connected consoles, but it's all a bit totalitarian, isn't it?

Anyone had a look at the redesigned Avatar Editor yet? Horrendous.

Don't really mind the rest of it so far. It does all seem a bit tailored to the Kinect crowd.

The Avatar editor has put all the clothes on 4 squares EITHER SIDE of your avatar. It makes it very confusing to see what you're dressing them up in.

I don't like the new font for the menu headers - you know the "My Xbox", "Game Marketplace" vertical scrolling bit? They're too close together and it looks shit.

I wish you could pick which notifications you can have. Basically, I want cheevos, but not friend coming online

Fuck you too.

The sound it makes over your headset when you join a party sounds like someone banging two saucepan lids together!

I just spoke to Poikies and the new codec isn't all that impressive. It's a bit clearer I think, but not by much.

Do you have super turtle headsets, or the boggostandard xbox ones? I wonder how much of a difference that would make either way?

I have the super turtle jobby, which by all accounts is good quality. The microphone on the headset when plugged into a PC is capable of seriously high quality audio recording - there's a demo on YouTube, so the codec is definitely still the limiting factor. Unless Perkies had a sock in his mouth/the Xbox mic isn't very good (which I doubt).

Were you in a party or just over voice chat? I suspect it was a party.

From what I've read it's only the party chat that's improved. It'll be interesting to see how it fares with more than 2 people. I'll try that out tonight.

I just joined a party with Perkies, no games were involved. It's definitely better than it was, but it's not exactly clear. It's still "phone quality", if you get me? It's not the crystal clear connection I was expecting.

It's easier to find where to turn friends only chat on is now.