Just turned of the "regular" television, as the Champions League final match in Athens has ended, and turned a bit more attention over to the laptop which has been running the latest updated version of Joost for some hours. Incidentally the wikipedia page is already up to date with the result - Milan getting it with a 2 to 1 win over L'pool
Now the shows have their own direct links, such as this for an introduction to drawing - sending you to a (rather empty) information page, along with a dedicated link to start the program in Joost (joost: protocol)
Also the sorting in the channel guide seems to work now - and that is a good thing with the number of available channels growing, even a small subset runs into 40 channels so sorting by genre or personal preference is nice.
Still it needs a bit more intelligence to "combine the best of the web"; like folders - just like Google reader let's you group rss feeds, the channel guide should be in levels, giving the option for packages and collections of channels and searches. That way all the animation could have one folder, the music another and the assorted sci-fi'ish stuff a third - making it easier to browse and jump between channels.
If the information and grouping was sent to the central servers it might also make it easier to predict next shows for pre-caching in the background thereby increasing the speed of swapping channels
And still no widget toolkit to play around with - might have to have a look at some of the forum post about possible direct hacks to the existing client to get a better feel of the options.
...and the sun gets up much to early in the summer...
