Bagel Belly Blog

Forget about it

I just saw in my news aggregator that Joost has the entire season one of transformers now available. Now that's what I call compelling content - excellent! (What can I say? I'm a geek, so sue me.) So I rushed to fire up the Joost application, thrilled at the prospect of returning to 1984 and reliving that bit of my childhood.

But sadly, for some strange reason, the Joost app wasn't running, it just sat there in the menu bar looking forlorn, with no shiny full-screen TV-on-my-desktop experience. Suspecting a problem with the beta I was using, I went and grabbed the latest, installed it, and fired it up.

And then I saw the screen I dread every time I try to use Joost:

Sign in to Joost
Joost Name:
Joost Password:

... and of course the name/password fields are blank. Why's this bad?

I can never predict when I'll be asked for my Joost name and password. I think they get zapped every time I upgrade, but I'm not sure. And we've already been bumped from original registration details to a new set of "friendly" names. Because I have to enter the details infrequently, they don't stick in my memory. Secrets to increased adoption 101: don't throw arbitrary barriers in front of your users.

Secondly, almost EVERY OTHER APPLICATION on my laptop is well-behaved enough to store login details in the Mac OS X keychain, so I don't need to remember them. Even Firefox, which fails to integrate with the keychain, is good enough to provide it's own implementation. So why not Joost?

Dear Joost: you are not a unique and lovely wallflower so precious that I can consign extra special space in my memory to remembering your login details above all others. So please store them sensibly and stop asking me for them at random intervals, mmm k?

Update: finally remembered the username and password. Fired up Joost, connected, spent some time looking for Transformers. They blogged about it, it must be here! Nope, no luck. Took another look at the website:

Riiiight.

Technorati Tags: computing, critique, joost, tv