Re: [Usability] Some usability feedback

[Reinout van Schouwen <reinouts gnome org>]

On Mon, 29 Nov 2004, Mariano Suárez-Alvarez wrote:

> Actually, burning data and burning music are tasks so different that
> it'd be really strange to have them anywhere tied together.

I see where you're coming from, but I don't completely buy the argument.
When I have a folder filled with ogg files, it will have a context menu 
allowing me to add it to the Rhythmbox library. When opened, 
gst-thumbnailer will give them sound icons and at some point I even got 
to hear the song itself when I hovered my mouse pointer over it. The 
point being, GNOME apparently *recognizes* that we're dealing with music 
files here. So how is it *not logical* to start burning an audio CD when 
dragging these files to burn:/// or selecting a few and rightclick > 
burn to CD?

> What we need is a user level notion of a playlist, which can be created,
> edited, played, and burnt onto cds, and so on. This tasks would be done

Good idea. Bastien, do you think it is feasible to have a shared (fd.o?) 
playlist format for all (GNOME) multimedia apps?

> context menu, but it is generally agreed (and reasonable) that anything
> in ~/Templates should be put there by the user herself,

Is it? That's sure to keep Templates functionality as undiscoverable as 
it is now.

> either, if we had something like vfolders capable of looking into
> metadata attached to ogg's and mp3's.

At some point, Cantus3 was proposed for inclusion in GNOME, but it was 
agreed that its functionality should be integrated in other programs 
(nautilus, rhythmbox...) Does anyone know if work has been done on that?

> I think I can summarize what this rant is trying to convey: I really
> think that instead of adding applications to the desktop, we should be
> adding object types.

As a former OS/2 (Workplace Shell) user, I can only heartily agree. =)

regards,

--
Reinout van Schouwen			student of Artifical Intelligence
email: reinout cs vu nl			mobile phone: +31-6-44360778

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