Apparently I was not the only one who was very unhappy with the way Sharkbyte handles updates, so the Sharkbyte team has implemented a way to make sure that users always have the latest version.
It’s not perfect, but it’s a very good start.
The complaints I still have with it are relatively minor compared to silent failure, but will hopefully be addressed soon anyway:
- On my machine the alert dialog popped under my open windows, so I didn’t see it for a couple of hours.
- When the user does finally see the dialog, it’s not actually clear that it came from Sharkbyte.
I actually prefer that point 1 not interrupt my work by popping up a dialog on top of my other windows, but it would be nice if it popped up if I was trying to listen to music with an outdated version of Sharkbyte, or if it at least flashed in the taskbar to get my attention.
Complaints aside, it seems like everyone at Grooveshark is coming to realize that the user experience is paramount and that is something that I am very pleased about.
To paraphrase Skyler (since I don’t remember exactly what he said) today:
We have to remember the user; we might spend all day wrestling with SQL queries, but we have to remember that’s not what Grooveshark is about. We have to remember the users and make sure that we are making the site better for them with everything that we are doing.
Apologies to Skyler if I completely got that quote wrong. Feel free to correct me.
Chanel's Blog
March 5, 2008 at 2:42 pm
Sharkbyte Team Hard at Work…
At Grooveshark, in order to play music you need our helper application we call Sharkbyte that handles all of the p2p functionality and music playback. Recently there was a post by a friend of mine Jay, also an employee of Grooveshark, describing some …