Re: CD Writing Proposal

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Fri, 2004-05-28 at 21:18, Benjamin Kahn wrote:
>     This was a proposal I made a while back about improving Nautilus
> CD burning.  I never sent it anywhere, but I thought this was as good
> a time as any to send it along since the maintainership just changed. 
> The basic idea is to make the process a little easier to understand
> and discover.
> 
> I'm interested in comments.  The latest proposal is available at: 
> http://www.zoned.net/~xkahn/nautilus-cd-burning
> There are also glade and GIMP files there and more mockup images.

I'm aware that the current system is a bit hard to discover, and I've
long wanted to make it better. However, I've not had time to really sit
down and figure out all the details. The solution is probably somehow to
at least partially connect cd burning with cd icons in Computer and
things like that, but there is always problematic not-really-edge cases
such as RW rewriting and the things other people have come up with here.

Your proposal has some good ideas, and is a good start. Without sitting
down to think about this exhaustively, here is what i don't like about
it:

* The wizard-style dialog popups on blank cd insert. I tend to think
that popping up such dialogs isn't very elegant and doesn't make you
feel like you understand and control the system, instead you just get
lots of questions all the time. And if you once click the "don't ask me
this again" you know its gonna bite you later when you want to do
something different, and its impossible to re-enabling the dialog.

I'd like something thats less in-your-face-and-interrupts-your-work, but
that still detects that a blank was inserted and makes some changes that
uses this fact to make it easier to detect it and start cd burning.

Windows has dialogs like this, and I hate them. And my dad ("typical
user") just gets confused by them, so I doubt they help many.

* The placement of nautilus-cd-burner in the application menu. I'd
really like nautilus-cd-burner to be an integrated part of the system,
so that writing cds is as natural with the file manager as copying a
file. This is hard, but totally punting it and calling it an app isn't a
nice solution. And anyway, if an app in the menu launches a window
manager window (which hopefully users doesn't think of as an "app") that
might be confusing.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
 Alexander Larsson                                            Red Hat, Inc 
                   alexl redhat com    alla lysator liu se 
He's a leather-clad drug-addicted cyborg from the Mississippi delta. She's a 
plucky psychic vampire with only herself to blame. They fight crime!