OK, it is an improvement that you can now select a show date from a pulldown menu. BUT that’s all you can do. Until you can see an entire week’s, or preferably, month’s show rundown AND check a box for each segment you want to hear to be added to a playlist it will still be dysfunctional. They put a download link for most, but not all, story segments so you can download them one by one, but again, unless you can check boxes and download them all at once, it ain’t fixed. There is an option to add a segment to the playlist which is laughable. You click it and it loads the accursed media player, which typically takes a full minute on Firefox, and SOMETIMES but not always, adds the clip to the playlist. Then you go back and wait another minute for the show page to load and keep going. So this feature is worthless. Again, the only acceptable thing here would be a checkbox next to each story. I get the general impression that NPR either just doesn’t get the user experience or that some less than capable programmer just can’t do any better. I’m pretty sure all of this is doable with Flash. Meanwhile we the listeners are stuck with this monstrosity for now. I am hoping someone will write a Greasemonkey script or addon that modifies the interface to allow more functional use.

http://www.nprportal.org

1. It is even less functional in Firefox than in IE, which I refuse to use.

2. When you click a program link it opens the player, if it is not already open in a tab or window, and adds a list of stories to your playlist. There is no culling of duplicates so if you wander away from the player and try to resume where you left off, first you have to click the original link which then adds a whole new list of duplicate stories to the playlist. There is no way to modify this behavior by a configuration dialog. If you open a different link your playlist grows. You can manually clear the list but then you lose the current playlist as well. You can refresh the page to get it back but that’s a kludgy solution at best. Also, when you click a link in another tab, it opens in the tab that already has the player open but does not transfer focus to that tab.

3. The volume control pad must be clicked and dragged to control the volume. You can’t just click beside the pad and jump to a higher/lower volume like in any media player. When the ad starts when you first start the player, the volume is fairly high and very annoying. I can mute the system volume but why should I have to? In Firefox the ad frame covers the player’s volume control until the ad plays. Sometimes it persists so you have to turn down the system volume to a tolerable level. That is beyond intrusive in my opinion.

4. The playlist window does not respond to the mouse scrollwheel like in any media player.

5. When you click in the gutter of the scroll bar it advances only 3 stories at a time and not the expected entire page. This slows down navigation.

6. Most annoying, the story titles are truncated and there are no tooltips to show you the entire title when hovering the cursor over the title area. You have to click the story and listen to it before you see the entire title over in the main window of the player. This makes it unnecessarily difficult to decide which stories you might want to eliminate from the playlist. Considering that the entire player interface is about half as wide as the screen, this is a true waste of screen real estate.

7. Deleting entries from the playlist is tedious. You have to click a little x for each one and use the dysfunctional scrolling mechanism to go to other entries you want to delete. A simple checkbox arrangement with a delete button would make this a much more streamlined operation.

8. If you make the mistake of clicking a link in the main player window, you leave the player behind and lose the audio stream, and when you return it adds yet another duplicate playlist and starts from the first entry of that list. There is virtually no way of resuming from where you left off.

9. If you pause the player and return to resume it, even seconds later sometimes, you wait eternally for the stream to buffer and end up having to replay the story, losing your place in the stream.

10. There is no free way to download the stream so you can listen to it in the player of your choice and the NPR idea of podcasting is naive at best. They make available streams that THEY want you to listen to and very few at that.

So, in general, we have a highly dysfunctional player that monopolizes the browser and doesn’t have the option to play the stream live in another player or download it for portable listening. I think the extreme dysfunctionality of the player is inexcusable. It lacks nearly all of the functionality of any freeware media player. I get the impression that it was programmed by summer interns and not by professional programmers. That said, as you pointed out, NPR just doesn’t get the web experience at all. The player occupies less than a third of the screen with white space all around. I already mentioned the cut-off titles and the problem with clicking on a link in the main window. But it goes beyond just that. All that unused white space is just screaming for extra content. Links to relevant content about the current story. Sidebars showing videos and images related to the current story. Heck, I wouldn’t even mind ad frames at this point. It would be more honest and less invasive than that annoying mandatory 30 second audio ad when you first tune in, and sometimes several times during a listening session. I see a lot of missed opportunity here. As bad as Real Player and WMP are, they are still better than the NPR player. At least we had SOME choice before. I don’t know what NPR’s current demographic is but the fact that they haven’t complained vehemently about this big step backwards and effected a correction implies that they are not too web savvy. It is up to the few that are aware of the infraction to make it known to NPR and its listeners that this is just unacceptable practice.