PlayStation 4′s front end: the good, the bad and the broken

http://media.edge-online.com/wp-cont...I-official.jpgFor the first few days, things were a bit too quiet on PlayStation 4. It’s only since the EU servers were switched on late last week that the front end of Sony’s system has come to life for us – and what we’ve seen since has been mixed. There’s an awful lot to like about PS4′s OS and interface, but much that needs fixing, too.Take the Share feature. As promised, a tap of what we used to call Select takes a screenshot and saves the past 15 minutes of gameplay; by default it brings up a menu that asks you whether you want to upload a video or a screengrab, but it can be configured so that a tap takes a screenshot and a long press brings up the menu. In reviewing PS4′s launch lineup this has felt like a revelation, a true next-gen feature after years of running consoles through screen-capture software.That feeling rather fades when you realise you can no longer copy your media to a USB drive. Screenshots can only be uploaded to either Twitter or Facebook, the former compressing our 1920×1080 screens to 1024×576, the latter to 960×540 – four pixels short of PS Vita’s native resolution. Worse, there appears to be a limit on how much you can share at once, with our attempts to share a batch of Killzone: Shadow Fall screens met with an error code after just four uploads. This is a reviewer’s problem, admittedly – Sony clearly wants you to share shots as you take them – but it’s an arbitrary limit that’s hard to understand.http://media.edge-online.com/wp-cont...re-610x343.jpgThe Share button isn’t what it could be – there are some strange restrictions on what you can do with your captures.

The What’s New tile that’s positioned front and centre whenever you turn on the machine, however, is a delight. At a glance you can see what friends – now referred to by their real names, providing you’ve exchanged Name Requests – have been up to. I’m a button press away from seeing the Olivier Giroud goal that Access TV’s Nathan Ditum has proudly uploaded (oddly, he’s a Spurs fan). I can see the triple kill that Umbra Software’s Thomas Puha shared from Call Of Duty: Ghosts, and the Need For Speed Rivals Trophies that The Guardian’s Keith Stuart unlocked during his most recent session. If they’re still online, I’m a button press away from joining them; if they’re not, the same button will load up the game. And if I don’t own it, a button press will take me straight to the PlayStation Store. It’s a smart, snappy system that on several occasions has prompted a change of heart and made me load up a different game to the one I was planning on playing.It’s made joining a game so easy, in fact, that it’s a little easier to forgive the bizarre absence of notifications when friends come online – something Microsoft has also, for some reason, discarded in the generational transition. Perhaps PS4′s increased friends list limit, up from 100 to 2,000, is behind the change, but it’s an odd retrograde step for a console designed with social interaction at its core.PS4′s front end is certainly more intuitive to navigate than PS3′s XMB, and the console’s multitasking is a breath of fresh air coming after seven years of having to quit a game to make even the most minor of settings changes. Tap the PS button in the centre of the controller and you can change screen resolution, audio setup, network settings and even which user is logged in before another tap of PS puts you right back into the game. And while switching to another game will close down the one that’s running, loading an app merely suspends it: you can watch something on Netflix then switch back to the game to pick up exactly where you left off.Yet while splitting the UI into two rows – one for games and media, the other for everything else – looks clean at first, things change as you amass a bigger library of games. What’s New will always occupy the leftmost slot, with whichever disc is in the tray right next to it. From there, games, plus icons for the Music Unlimited and Video Unlimited services and a TV & Video tile, are presented in order of most recently played, and there’s no way of sorting them alphabetically. As we scroll to the right at speed trying to remember whether we most recently played Resogun before Knack or after Killzone, the console struggles to load in thumbnails in time; when we reach the end of the list and flick all the way back to the left, we find the artwork for the games at the start of the list is loading in again. There are only 18 icons on that list at the moment, and it’s only going to get bigger. That a console with 8GB of memory can’t cache a handful of thumbnails is puzzling, if not worrying.

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