Re: Call for a Gnome Media Center

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Wed, 14 Feb 2007, Ross Burton wrote:

> Date: Wed, 14 Feb 2007 10:22:37 +0000
> From: Ross Burton <ross burtonini com>
> To: GNOME Desktop Devel List <desktop-devel-list gnome org>
> Subject: Re: Call for a Gnome Media Center
>
> On Wed, 2007-02-14 at 10:56 +0100, Christian F.K. Schaller wrote:
> > As for a shared database this might be a good idea, but I will leave
> > that up to application writers to decide, for me a good start would be
> > that all Music applications for instance tried hard to get people to
> > save their Music under $HOME/Music for instance. That way when you
> > start
> > another Music application or Elisa you don't need to specify which
> > directory to look for Music inn. Similar conventions would be good for
> > pictures and movies and album/dvd cover art.
>
> Just last week I got a bug report and a patch for this in Sound Juicer.
> It hard-codes the default location to save files as ~/Music/.  Now, my
> question is this: do I commit this, or do we need a more powerful system
> that handles i18n?  I'm sure a Persian GNOME user would not like their
> music in ~/Music/.  One quick solution is to translate the string
> "Music"... is that enough?

We've run around this mulberry bush many times before[1], especially when
it came to talking about the Desktop folder and a Documents folder.

The question of what about non-English users will likely be followed by
what about multilingual users and many more questions.  It is very easy to
make this problem very complicated but the simple truth is the file system
is full of folders with English names and that isn't going to change.
Delaying this even longer is a disservice to Gnome users, even the
non-English speakers.

Hopefuly what might change is that Gnome might finally be ablet decide on
some kind of suitable default folders for Documents, Music, and Pictures.
Sure some users will organise themselves and others will not organise
anything at all but by providing good default save locations there will be
a whole lot of people in the middle who will get a little bit more
organised thanks to the affordance provided.

[Personally I think a folder ~/Documents/ is needed with other user files
such as music, pictures, spreadsheets, and anything else getting put in
subfolders of ~/Documents/ rather than creating lots of folders like
~/Music directly in the home directory but either way I'd be very happy if
we could push to make something happen here, just so long as we avoid
sticking the patronising "My " prefix in front of everything (which
thankfully Microsoft have finally dropped).]

-- 
Alan

[1] Various discussions on standard folders such as "Documents"
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2003-January/msg00273.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2004-October/msg00016.html
http://mail.gnome.org/archives/usability/2005-June/msg00089.html