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

Alexander Larsson alexl at redhat.com
Tue Sep 9 11:25:59 UTC 2003


On Tue, 2003-09-09 at 09:41, Nils Philippsen wrote:
> On Mon, 2003-09-08 at 20:59, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> > On Mon, 2003-09-08 at 12:44, Chris Ricker wrote:
> > 
> > > > 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.
> 
> This is what we should do, and I think I have done my part of it ;-): My
> wife (she is one of those prototype end users who find all the bugs)
> told me that she wouldn't _expect_ a "burn this" button in the playlist
> manager/music app/whatever. I.e. if she would want to burn her music she
> would first go to the CD burning app (or Nautilus module, implementation
> doesn't matter), because she doesn't use music apps very often (she
> listens to CDs on the stereo if she wants music) and so doens't know of
> a "burn this" button. So do the same and ask your spouses, friends,
> household members, other _ordinary_ people.

If you ask a user "how would you burn an audio CD" you will probably get
the answer "use the cd burning application", yes. In other words, not a
file manager window (like Nautilus). Furthermore I think this question
is very skewed. In practice if you even have any audio tracks on the
computer to burn and you ever listened to them you would have used the
media player and noticed the "burn to CD" button in it. So using that
functionallity would be very natural.

Its like asking a user "how would you burn files to a cd". Many would
probably answer "use a cd burning app". But I thought it would be far
better if you just inserted a blank CD, copied the files like you
normally copy files (using the *file* manager, Nautilus) and then press
the burn button. Thats why I implemented nautilus-cd-burner, and this is
the kind of integration I want in the desktop.

If your wife really wants to use an feature-packed do-everything cd
burner app like the ones common on windows we're not stopping her, there
are several and we ship some. However, the cd burning facilities in
nautilus are meant to be an easy-to-use extension of the file manager
facilities, not a featurefull application. Audio burning just doesn't
match the file manager user model and standard interfaces that well. It
does match the model of some media players though, so I think it makes
more sense there. 

Of course, none of the cd burning code is in nautilus, and it won't be
in the media player either. The code will all be shared in a separate
package (currently called nautilus-cd-burner, which mostly uses cdrecord
to do its thing).

So, basically what I'm saying is: Nautilus is not a CD burning
application, it is a file manager that lets you copy files to CDs.
Technically it *could* be extended with all sorts of UI gadgets to allow
it to burn audio cds, video dvds or do whatever you want, but I think
that will make Nautilus a worse UI for file management since it
complicates the user model, and in my opinion it wouldn't be the best
way to burn audio cds or video dvds anyway.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl at redhat.com    alla at lysator.liu.se 
He's a scarfaced small-town cop on the edge. She's a virginal cigar-chomping 
doctor with an evil twin sister. They fight crime! 





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