Re: Proposed Modules, My Take

[Havoc Pennington <hp redhat com>]

On Sun, 2005-01-16 at 19:12 -0400, Steven Garrity wrote:
> Yeah, I agree with J�re. Havoc's question (why combine the player 
> and ripper) is a good one, but I think thinking of it the "window 
> representing my audio CD" as J�ggests.

This is so backward! Start with the tasks, don't implement and then come
up with a way to think of it that makes sense ;-)

> Having tried out Goobox, with already has this implemented, I think the 
> idea stands up. It's good at both ripping and play without sacrificing 
> much.

Why sacrifice at all? There's no real implementation efficiency win here
to speak of. It's trivial to share 99% of the code. I think the
sacrifice is significant, too.

>From looking here:
http://www.gnome.org/~paobac/goobox/screenshot-001.png
http://www.gnome.org/~paobac/goobox/screenshot-004.png

goobox is just a CD player UI, and the extraction UI is inferior to
sound-juicer.

The reason it's inferior is that there are more steps and crap to look
at. With sound-juicer you just click Extract and that's all you do. If
you want to edit tracks, you just change them in place. If you don't
want a track, you uncheck it. No menus, no questions about format or
where to save, no dialogs. S-J has prefs if you want to go in there and
change all that crap, but I did it one time and have never opened the
menus again.

So all you'd do here is have goobox (or equivalent) launch the s-j
window if you click on a "Rip" button/menuitem. If tracks are selected
in the player, they could be automatically checked accordingly in s-j.

If I remember Ross's mockup of sound-juicer with CD player from his
blog, that had the opposite problem. It was a ripper with a bad CD
player glommed in there rather than a CD player with a bad ripper
glommed in there. ;-)

>  It's one less app to maintain - one less menu item to have in the 
> "Sound & Video" menu category, and one less new interface to learn.

Sticking them in the same window shouldn't save user learning or
programmer maintenance work to speak of. Two windows in GTK is pretty
much the same effort as two areas in 1 window. The code can be 99% the
same here. If startup time is an issue, it can even be the same process.

I just think Sound Juicer is close to Perfect because I conceive of the
task, I insert my CD, and I push one button. And all the tasks I've ever
run into, like skipping a track or fixing the name of the track, have
been equally trivial and easy to perform.

For a player, you have other priorities. You want all the play controls;
you want the album art; you might not want the checkboxes and the in-
place editing of artist/album/song because it's more important to be
able to select them easily and have them look nice or be small; you
probably don't want the big Extract button; you might want to sync with
the Rhythmbox small display UI/appearance. So a player isn't going to be
optimized for ripping, it has its own priorities.

The two distinct UIs are both incredibly simple and don't even look like
computer programs; they barely need menus. The combined UI suddenly
looks like software.

Havoc