@DJS-Plex said:
This isn’t ready for prime time. The interface is sluggish (navigation between main screen and sub menus is horrid) and lacks feature sets that I’ve come to rely on (search / folders). Speaking on the slowness its particularly bad when moving from a sub folder to the main home screen. The amount of time it takes for it to render a new fresh home screen is simply too long.
[The Fix]
editing this post in the event others see it… you can add back the ‘classic’ or proven interface
https://owner.roku.com/add/plexclassic
The new app is pretty but functionally … its needs a lot of work. Don’t force people to upgrade to an application that doesn’t have the at least the same feature sets. (mostly annoyed because i’ve setup friends, family, co-workers with rokus and I get to hear all of them ■■■■■ about it… at least now I have a work around).
Maybe it’s your setup/server. We’ve been using the new version in Preview since the first day we received the email announcing it ages ago. My husband generally hates change but quickly came to love so much that he had me remove the old one from our channels. I have to admit missing a couple of features when I first tried it, but instead of telling the devs they were terrible for listening to what people have asked for and working on something new, I asked if maybe I just missed the features I was looking for in the old app. Guess what, I was. They were there all along and more besides. There are a lot of features in the new app that are the same with slightly different navigation. Now there’s a lot more ways of searching and finding and sorting media, quickly, on the fly. This dev team works hard and they do amazing work. There’s nothing else like Plex out there…XBMC, not even close. All I’m saying is, before you start slamming some great work, take just a few minutes and learn how to use it. The old one will remain available in its own channel according to the dev team.
Heh logged on to check my account… and always funny to see this kind of post after I have long forgot about it. Appears “ravengel” didn’t read my subsequent posts about why I was complaining. All too often companies release material that isn’t ready for prime time. Some of us in the tech world have gotten used to this. This is evident in the gaming community when developers are pressured by their bosses/investors to push out code that isn’t ready. Plex knew that there were missing elements in the new interface, but pushed the product out anyway.
That is probably fine for most techies, we can push through it. However… for those non-techies who are suddenly faced with a new interface it can be quite jarring. Forced updates for major change revisions might be fine if your a single household. However, when your a tech geek and you are the sole tech support for the 20+ rokus (remotely) your going to have a bad day. Explaining to Grandma how to work her VCR doesn’t even remotely compare how to work out the details of using Roku/Plex. No matter how intuitive **you **think the new interface is, many others are not so technically inclined will struggle.
The problem is further exacerbated by a poorly performing product. This was evident on a number of roku devices that I and other individuals that I knew that ran plex in conjunction with roku clients. Not all of them had issues, ROKU 2 seemed to be more of an issue than the ROKU3 series (as one might expect). Given the wide number of devices (some running different firmware releases) that were tested along with different servers used (removing that as a point of contention), the end result was less than satisfactory.
The product simply was not ready for full release at the time, it was still in beta (as far as I was concerned). The staff got over eager and deployed it prematurely (at least for the Roku implementation, web and other platforms were ahead… except PS4/PS3). It was only after several revisions the product was polished enough for full release (in my opinion).
