TiVo Community Forums Archives - "Unbloat" the Guide

TiVoCommunity.com
(c)opyright 1995-2005 All rights reserved
indexcheckTC
This area is a static history of posts in the TiVo Community Forum Archive.
This archive history was made for the simple indexing of search sites like Google.

Pages:1

"Unbloat" the Guide
(Click here to view the original thread with full colors/images)

Posted by: TiVoriffic

This was one suggestion that hit me right away when I stopped using the cable box guide and started to use the TiVo guide.

Why does the Guide need the fat blue border around it? And why don't they use the entire screen area for it? It is a gigantic waste of space and makes less of the screen real estate available for actual information, which is the point of using the Guide. It is pretty annoying to read things like "Keeping Up Appe..." and "The Adventures of..." instead of the entire show title, when I know that it could be different so very easily. Slim down the blue border and I could read the entire title of the shows and see at-a-glance which channel is ESPN2 and which is ESPNNEWS instead of ESPN... on the guide.

Maybe a solution is to allow us to increase/decrease the font size in the Guide. If they won't fit more information in the guide, at least use the extra space you would have gained by slimming the border to give me the option to decrease the font size, eh?

I can also see an argument for increasing the font size in some cases. Part of the reason my father-in-law returned a TiVo he bought is because he had trouble reading the Guide. His eyesight is no longer the greatest and he "only" has a 27" TV. The other part is that he had trouble reading the small print on the remote and using the tiny number buttons.

I dunno. I think the overall best approach would be to use more of the screen for information and less for "window dressing". Perhaps then the need for changing the font would disappear.

-TiVoriffic

Posted by: bobsoron

Actually, I think a better solution is to reduce the size of the gutters between columns, not only there but systemwide. Two nights ago I was browing by channel, and it's amazing how much wasted space is on that screen as well.

Posted by: MrGadget

I'd never really thought about it before, but it does look like they could make better use of the available space.

Posted by: BrettStah

Yeah, they have lots of "white space" reserved for the little navigation arrows. It'd be nice if they'd redesign some/all of those screens to be more efficient (without everything looking too cluttered).

Posted by: sacherjj

I have used some older T Vs and Monitors that trimmed quite a bit of the picture off. I think this might be a "safety zone" so that the main infomation for any screen is still on screen for ALL TVs.