I was just watching the below video on wmpoweruser.com and noticed something I hadn’t seen before; now that I have seen it though I have a feeling it will bug me every time I do see it.

At the start of the video the pictures and Zune (0:20) hub are shown off before the gaming hub and Xbox Live features are demoed. What I noticed is that in the Pictures hub (and indeed all hubs and apps on Windows Phone 7) the screen is populated by elements moving in from the right on a horizontal plane and then when clicking on elements with the hub and drilling further into the Pictures app everything rotates about left screen; this is actually explained in great detail on one of the Design Day videos. However, on the Zune app when an element is clicked the item actually moves down the screen and the elements fill the screen up from the bottom along the vertical axis.

This might seem a trivial issue to many but to me Metro UI, specifically those parts that Microsoft are in charge of, are meant to be uniform which this animation within the Zune hub is not. Despite being a very subtle difference it is immediately irritating, well from watching the videos anyway.

I tried thinking of why Microsoft may have decided to implement the animations with the Zune hub this way, all I can think of is that perhaps when browsing in the Zune software its more likely users will need to scroll up and down the page more so than swiping left or right; by bringing elements in from the bottom it does suggest that there is more content off the bottom of the screen. I suppose this could be beneficial but when all other hubs and apps have horizontal animations the vertical ones in Zune just feel wrong, very wrong.

I know the build in the video is not yet final so there is still a chance that this might be tweaked to make it more consistent but I fear that this is how the hub will ship.

If anyone knows or finds out why the Zune hub is different I would be very interested to know.