CD burning with Nautilus, was: Why xcdroast and not gcombust?

[Havoc Pennington]

On Mon, 2003-09-08 at 12:44, Chris Ricker wrote:
> On Mon, 8 Sep 2003, Owen Taylor wrote:
> 
> > One thing to keep in mind is that "the major Windows cd burning
> > applications" are competing with each other to have more features, even
> > if the feature really doesn't belong there, it helps you look more
> > impressive in the magazine review checklist.
> 
> But of course that cuts both ways. One can just as easily say the same thing
> about music players as an explanation for why, say, iTunes can burn CDs but
> shouldn't....

Windows Media Player also burns music CDs, and I've seen people use it
for that. But sure, the only point here is that simply copying what
exists isn't the way to get a firm answer to the question of what's
best. ;-)

> > We have a certain freedom to do things in the right place that someone
> > writing a CD burning application for Windows doesn't have.
> 
> Sure, but why is a music player the right place to burn audio CDs? Why isn't
> a CD burning application the right place? To me, the data content is
> irrelevant, and it's very counter-intuitive to think that I would use an
> audio player to burn CDs. Otherwise, by the same logic I should use my email
> program to archive my emails to CD, and my IM client to archive my messages,
> and vi to archive my text files, and my....

If you really want to answer this question in a methodical way, there is
a whole discipline you can get a degree in. My favorite book I like to 
suggest is called "Designing From Both Sides of the Screen"

If you follow the well-thought-out process there for answering the
questions "who will use this?" "what do they want to do?" "how should
the UI facilitate that?" then you can come to some kind of serious
answer to the question.

Otherwise we're all just speculating on a mailing list and not
addressing tradeoffs or dealing with empirical data. We wouldn't try to
write software without having a background in software design and
following a methodology, and we shouldn't try to design UIs that way 
either.

Not that I'm above speculating on mailing lists ;-) fwiw I 
think it makes a ton of sense that if I have a playlist I should be able
to say "put this playlist on a CD" - keep in mind that iTunes is
primarily a playlist/music-library manager, not just a player in the
xmms mold.

Havoc