APR
30
2005

All Over

Submitted by Jonathan Riddell

The Ubuntu Down Under conference is now closed. Mark gave some closing thanks which I noted down, again completely un-proofread and spellchecked.

Finally on the last day I found a fellow KDE coder. sebr the elite Amarok hacker. Jeff Waugh explained how #gnome-hackers had been laughing at the scary Amarok setup wizard, I'd like to get rid of that for Kubuntu, infact if Amarok could be simplified by default and keep the fancy features for those who want them that would be great.

In the evening we went on a mystery group outing to see the Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy film. Fun stuff but not as good as the original radio of course, or even the new radio out in a few days. Mark and Jeff below doing star jumps below the Dark Lord from the Star Wars trailer, just because they could.

Comments

Hmm, which is the Scottish guy? I can't tell. ;)

What's wrong with the wizard? Choosing your collection root directory is necessary and enables many features of amaroK.

Ex-XMMSers have the option to use player widget, which they'll be more familiar with, hopefully meaning they'll be happy campers.

The database selection is a necessary evil, since otherwise it would be a right pain to setup MySQL or postresql. Users who don't care and can't read (I understand this is the majority of users :) ) can click just hit next and be OK.

Basically the wizard makes opening up amaroK config window unnecessary in the case of a distribution that has sound and amaroK's sound engines setup correctly.

By [email protected] at Sat, 04/30/2005 - 17:37

that might be Riddell, as he's from Scottland :)

This amarok-Wizzard is just superfluid. As the one in Kaffine btw. You only need to set one thing manually there - the place where the files are. And for this a Folder like "My Music" (pleace NOT with this silly name!) is planned. Today I saw a Windows XP installation the very first time - after that you hate EVERY Wizzard!

By Kai F. Lahmann at Sat, 04/30/2005 - 18:43

I'm amazed anyone could describe it as scary or superfluous. How do we find out where you music is without it? scan the whole system? That's a good idea.

Removing the setup-wizard is a really crazy stupid idea, I'd love to hear some intelligent reasoning for it as I really cannot for the life of me think of any.

I'd love to hear what #gnome-hackers had to say about the wizard. Scary is the last thing I expected to be told. I always thought it was absolutely the opposite. Clear, simple and with the minimum of steps.

By mxcl at Sat, 04/30/2005 - 19:37

temper, temper, mxcl ;). Btw, I utterly agree with you - amaroK's wizard is just fine, as is Kaffeine's one: you see what you have on your system, how to set it up, etc. Those Gnome minimalists had better make the drag'n'drop work with some other mouse button, instead of the middle one, than laugh at other ppl's superior work...

By brainkillah at Sat, 04/30/2005 - 22:54

Please define "fancy-feature" and what could be simplified. If I agree I will implement :-)

Also we can't remove the wizard, it's there because we have to setup the database. What did they say was scary about it, may I ask?

By mxcl at Sat, 04/30/2005 - 20:03