Why not merge with JuK?
This seems to come up fairly frequently with people who talk to me about Kiwi and its goals and the seeming redundancy when compared with JuK. At the risk of possibly offending wheels (which is completely not my intention), I do have a few reasons to continue developing Kiwi, and these reasons are all valid to me.
- Kiwi is something that I like working on because it doesn't have the same design code-wise as JuK does. I like wheels, and I think he's a damned good coder, but I don't agree with all of his decisions about JuK's design and codebase.
- Kiwi isn't actually behind JuK when it comes to features. JuK has searching, and tagging. We have global keyboard shortcuts, passive popup notification, and a DCOP interface. (No idea if JuK has any of these features yet, but it didn't last time I checked.)
- Of course, personally, I think that we have a better infrastructure for future growth, but that might just be my pride talking.
- We've finally abstracted out our backend API so that adding new Source types (internet radio, portable MP3/Ogg player, audio CD, etc) is going to be a snap.
- wheels' aim for JuK is to make it a "media playing jukebox" which is a noble and admirable goal. But I want something as easy-to-use as iTunes, with extra care and attention paid to the UI and a clean design with optimizations where they're needed.
- I want usable, well-designed (API-wise and UI-wise) software that does exactly what I need, and JuK fails this, not because it's a bad program or because wheels is evil, but because JuK isn't my project and wheels isn't me.
- We have a half dozen CD burning apps, why not a half a dozen music players?
- I like having a project of my own where I can't hurt anybody else or step on peoples' toes.
- Binary metadata caching is for weenies.
- When was the last time that you wanted cheese-covered french fries covered in bacon? Ok, it doesn't really have anything to do with Kiwi or JuK, but I'm hungry.
- WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN?
- Lists suck.