The Gnome CD Player is not a piece of software well loved by developers and it's demise seems inevitable. When I asked I was told the reason for this desire to kill off Gnome CD Player I was told it was the unpleasant state of the old code and I can well believe it, I managed to cause a very strange crash which occurs only if you log in from a remote machine and attempt to use Gnome CD.
Now that Sound Juicer includes CD Playback as well as Ripping the future of Gnome CD Player is not looking very bright and the Sword of Damocles is already swinging over Gnome CD Player. There have been threats to kill off Gnome CD Player for quite a while but it seemed as if the comments of Havoc Pennington had helped postpone the inevitable but I knew it would take more if I wanted to keep Gnome CD Player around for a while longer.
In an effort to put my money where my mouth was[1] I have been trying to take took a closer look at Gnome CD Player. I am tried to help improve things and find ways to discourage the developers from quietly dropping it hoping instead it might be allowed to quietly survive a while longer.
There is a certain amount of churn involved in software and the old is replaced by the new but not always better. The reason I feel strongly about Gnome CD Player in is the sense of deja vu. When Microsoft updatedthe CD Player in Windows 2000 I was unimpressed by the replacement. The plain and simple CD Player from Windows 95 made from standard had been replaced by an awkward attempt to directly imitate a real CD player. One step forward, two steps back. There are of course many alternatives and Gnome CD Player is not the greatest CD Player ever but the constant churn of software and forced change can be very annoying for users. The forced upgrade is exactly the kind of thing people hated Microsoft for. I happen to like the relative simplicty of standalone CD Player without any themes or fancy visualisations. The clutter of an all-in-one audio player is not something I particularly appreciate and so I want to keep Gnome CD around a while longer.
The popular myth of Open Source is the code is available and in theory that means one can always build and maintain their own copies. This is not entirely practical or realistic for most people and it would require a lot of effort which could be avoided if the Gnome Multimedia developers are willing to let Gnome CD Player be retired slowly and not removed immediately now that Sound Juicer has can play CDs. The Gnome Multimedia developers hold all the power in this situation. Dropping Gnome CD Player from Gnome Multimedia will effectively kill it off and cause it to dissappear from distributions everywhere. Removing software is a lot easier than justifing adding software and once it is gone it will stay gone. As someone who is not a Systems Administrator and often has to accept the default setup this is signficant.
There is room enough for a standalone CD Player as well as a CD Ripper which include CD Playback. It is certainly useful to be able to preview the tracks before ripping them but it is a seperate task from a simple standalone CD Player. I really hope Gnome CD Player can gain a stay of execution and hang on a while longer.
There have also been suggestions of using a single all in one mega media player,
which does not exactly fit with the old Unix philosophy of "Do one thing
well".
The future of the Gnome Picture Viewer: Eye of Gnome (EoG) doesn't look great either, although the arrival of a new maintainer brings hope. It has been suggested Gnome should follow the lead of Apple and have a single universal Viewer application. Evince is the PDF Viewer for Gnome but it can also view images. Just to be different I'm going to have to use my Video Player to view images! Done it before using the Helix player from Real Software. It may be possible to hammer out the dents and create a few core applications which are really good at what they do. In the meantime I will have to keep watching and discourage any rush to kill off the old applications prematurely.
Last night I left both Garnome and Konstruct to build and today I played around with all kinds of new and improved Free Software. The KDE applications I particularly wanted to take another look at were Krita and Karbon 14, the painting and drawing applications for KDE. Karbon 14 is still stuck at Version 0.1 unfortunately. Karbon 14 reminds me a lot of Jasc Web Draw another Vector Graphics editor which I learned to use and am most comfortable using.
Using KDE is a real culture shock sometimes and it takes some getting used to, but I try to keep an open mind and be aware of what is happening in Open Source beyond the Gnome and Gtk+ applications. KDE does seem to be improving significantly thanks to the work of the Open Usability group.
Strangely I am starting to see K-isms everywhere. Both Inkscape and Webdraw refer to points on a Path as nodes but in Karbon 14 they are called knots instead.
It all serves as a timely reminder of how Less is more and how the approach advocated by Havoc Penningtion in his essay on Free Software User Interface Design has made a huge difference for Gnome. Occasionally I do find myself wishing I could tweak things here, or configure certain little things there but more than ever my belief in working for sensible defaults and in following the design philosophy of Keep it Simple Stupid (K.I.S.S.) is reaffirmed.