Re: The future of Gnome CD Themes?

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

I have taken a long time reading what you have written and carefully tried
to respond.  I hope I can adequately express my concerns and get back down
to business instead of speculation.  To try and keep it short and sweet
I've mercilessly cut and pasted bits of the conversation and totally
messed up the order.

> If I can do anything to make it easier, please tell me. However, I do
> not intend to support gnome-cd longer than absolutely required.

To me that statement sounds a whole lot like you desperately want to
remove Gnome CD Player as soon as Sound Juicer can play CDs.  It doesn't
sound like you would be willing to mark it as deprecated or no longer
maintained and leave it around until Gnome 3 (more realistically for 3-4
releases).

> In the end, however, we also have to consider the plain cruel facts:
...
> * gnome-cd sucks
> * sound-juicer totally rocks

To both those statements my feeling is "not so much" (I acknowledge the
techincal problems you mention and might discuss some of them later but
I barely notice them from my point of view as a user.)

Sound Juicer currently does one thing well, and I agree it does rock as a
Ripper.  I also understand that it will be useful to have CD player
functionality in a Ripper for preview purposes.

However I think that addresses a different audience and different task to
that of a simple standalone CD Player.

Speculation is all we have so far and I expect this conversation is
frustrating for both of us.  Sound Juicer may well evolve enough that I
would want to use it as a standalone CD Player but obviously I will have
to wait and see but at least but it is far better I say these things now
than after you have already decided not to ship the CD Player anymore.

I think that is pretty much covers the big issues but I'm going to respond
to some of your other points too.


> Gnome-CD has some (technical/design) issues that are not easy to solve,
> and it's UI really just isn't it.

> > 16/6 '04), I've promised Ross I'd do some coding on this. Gnome-CD
just
> > doesn't cut it. It's interface doesn't fit in with the rest of GNOME,

I don't think all bad and many other applications have their
inconsistencies.  More importantly if you could take the time to explain
in greater detail how you think it doesn't fit I might be able to suggest
ways to improve that are less work than a rewrite and possibly worth doing
anyway.

I have long entertained notions of replacing the row of buttons with a
proper toolbar widget, would look cleaner and would allow users to enable
text labels, I particularly like having priority text and that would give
me a proportionally bigger Play button.  (I think using a row of buttons
when a toolbar is really needed is a fairly common mistake, especially
when an application like Sound Juicer evolves from a small dialog to a
full application.)

After taking a nostalgic look at the Windows 98 CD I had a few other
ideas (like exposing existing functionality in a menubar)
particularly the View options to show or hide part of the interface.

If I cannot implement these ideas myself and you aren't particularly
interested maybe I'm being unrealistic and should instead try to make
Sound Juicer more suitable as a stand alone CD Player.


> > P.S.  If you could point me to where exactly the Track Editor Dialog
lives
> > I'd apprecaite it.  I'd like to make some minor tweaks to the users
> > interface, line the widgets up with each other and not much more than
> > that.
>
> CDDASlave2 directory IIRC

thanks.  if anyone else is reading and for future reference the specific
file for the CDDB Track Editor is:
gnome-media/cddb-slave2/cddb-track-editor.c

I had thought it might be easy to to get the text entry widgets to line up
nicely but now that I've looked at it and since it doesn't seem to be used
by anything but the doomed Gnome CD Player I'll probably wont try and
change it.

I figured a better use of my time would be to make some changes to the
docs instead.  http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=306798

I'd be willing to write a "Known Bugs" section for the Documentation if
you like.  I think a carefully worded section directing users to Sound
Juicer and politely warning that there are no plans for futher development
of CD Player and likely phase it out will help manage expectations of
other ordinary users who are happy enough with the CD Player.
I prefer to see Gnome CD Player pass away quietly and I hope I can find
ways to keep it around for a while but also keep it out of the way and
out of trouble.

Thanks for your time.

Sincerely

Alan Horkan

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