Re: CD Writing Proposal

[Benjamin Kahn <xkahn ximian com>]

On Tue, 2004-06-01 at 11:42 +0200, Alexander Larsson wrote:
> 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. 

Thanks.  Based on some of the comments, it seems like there are still a
number of refinements needed.

> 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.

	Yes, Windows and the Macintosh both have similar dialogs here.  Here
are the dialogs for each:

http://www.xvsxp.com/burning/images/burn-dialog.jpg
( http://www.xvsxp.com/burning/images/insert-cdr-menu.jpg )

http://www.xvsxp.com/images/cdburn-xp-1.jpg

Some alternatives could be:  
     1. Always open the nautilus CD burner window when a blank CD is
        inserted. 
     2. Simply create an icon on the desktop for the blank CD.
     3. Create a blank CD icon in the notification area
     4. Do nothing.  :^)

Obviously there are other possibilities.

> * 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.

	I haven't performed any testing of this yet, but I was trying to think
of the different ways people start trying to burn a CD.

     1. Insert the blank CD
     2. Start the CD burning application
     3. Grouping files (songs) into a directory
     4. Downloading the ISO
     5. Asking their kid to do it for them.

I wanted to cover option 2 since it seemed likely.