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

[Nils Philippsen]

On Mon, 2003-09-08 at 20:59, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 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.

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.

Another thing I learned from my GUI lecture was that you don't need a
thousand answers, the 10 or 20 we might get here by asking personally
are just enough in our case.

Nils
-- 
     Nils Philippsen    /    Red Hat    /    nphilipp at redhat.com
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary
 safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."     -- B. Franklin, 1759
 PGP fingerprint:  C4A8 9474 5C4C ADE3 2B8F  656D 47D8 9B65 6951 3011
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: This is a digitally signed message part
URL: <http://listman.redhat.com/archives/fedora-devel-list/attachments/20030909/9b1490a2/attachment.sig>