Zinc Beta 4 Available

New design and layout for Favorites

At Beta-4, Zinc has folded the New tab into the Favorites layout. The resulting hybrid view of the show and its individual episodes makes it easier to find something interesting to watch.
The Favorites tab now shows the last show watched, and most recently published content, allowing you to see at a glance what’s new for each favorite. Zinc automatically moves the most recently watched shows to the top of the list, which keeps the show you watch most often on the first page.

For serial shows like “24” and “Lost” where each episode builds on the previous one, Zinc will show you the last episode that you watched and then list the next episodes in the series.

Each section header tells you the number of unwatched videos and the total number of videos to give you a feel for how much new content there is to explore. Clicking into the favorite section header will place you on the last watched video.

There are also new visual indicators to help you keep track of what you‘ve watched: a sky blue line under an episode’s thumbnail image indicates that the video was at least partially watched, while a yellow underline indicates that it is the video most recently watched.

Continuous play of clips, news, and sports highlights

You may have noticed we have added clips to many of the feeds and separated them into sections. In Beta-4 when you start watching a series of clips, Zinc will automatically start the next clip after 5 seconds. There is an interstitial window to allow you to abort back to the menu- it will tell you how far you are into the set of clips, and what’s coming next, before playing the video.

We have found that most content under 20 minutes in duration is a good candidate for continuous play. There are however, some video where Zinc isn’t able to detect the end of the video and thus can’t continuous play those clips.

There is a user preference in the settings tab if you’d prefer to turn this feature on for all videos, or to disable the feature.

Other updates

Of course being able to show you what you have watched is dependent on allowing Zinc to remember the shows and movies you’ve accessed, so clearing your history will clear that information as well. To remove individual items from either History or Favorites, you can now simply use the Delete key. These controls are in the Settings -> System tab. To prevent accidental erasure there is now a confirmation window when you delete, and add or remove from Favorites.

The Zinc Search functionality has also been extended to return matching shows as well as the individual episodes.

Finally, within Netflix TV Shows, Zinc will display the list of episodes and allow users to pick them directly from within Zinc.