The Fugue

The ADB keyboard caps lock to control hack that I ported to 2.6 from a 2.4 patch that was floating around has just gone into Andrew Morton's -mm tree. Andy Wingo took the patch and added a /proc entry (way cool), and submitted it for inclusion.

Wow. Something I touched, in the kernel.

I've been giving Juk a try, and here's my somewhat brutal assessment. First let me say I love taglib, which seems to be by the same guy that wrote Juk. So I'm sure Juk will catch up with its features and become a great program. I don't really have any major gripes with the UI, which is high praise coming from me. I just don't find it to be stable enough for normal use. I'm looking at version 2.2.2.

The first thing you notice is that you have to pretty much install all of KDE to get Juk. This is an oft-debated issue that I'm not going to address further at this juncture.

The second thing I noticed is that it kept crashing on me. All. The. Time. Maybe it's just my karma; I tend to bring out the worst in software. Some of the bugs are reproducible, others seemed to be random, but for awhile I was crashing the thing every couple of minutes, literally. Once I learned what not to do, we started getting along better.

The complete instability is the primary reason I won't be using Juk in the near future, but the second reason is almost as compelling - it tends to skip. Ok, maybe it's not a skip, but a jump or a underrun, but the old terminology dies hard. Incidentally, I wasn't too keen about having to use artsd, I have no idea what akode is but I bet it's a bad idea, and gstreamer seems to underrun on OGGs for some reason. So basically, Juk isn't able to play music smoothly and that's not good enough for me. (Hint: a nice fat buffer is not a problem for music players!)

Now for what I liked. I already told you I like taglib, and Juk's tagger didn't disappoint me (aside from its being one of the more crashable aspects of the program). Its MusicBrainz support means this is the only program I've found so far that I can get to run that supports MusicBrainz, and it does so well. I wish there was more information about just how it made the matches though. In some cases I don't know which of the 10 versions of a song I've got, so I don't dare tag it with one of the versions, but if I knew the acoustic fingerprint was almost a perfect match, (much more so relatively speaking than the others) that might give me more confidence. I also like the automatic tree of Artist, Genre, and Albums, and the playlist stuff. I like random album mode. I dislike that turning random on and off is so hard. I found that it wasn't obvious which set of music was being considered for play at any time, but I like the history and queue interfaces.

In short, I like Juk but I won't be using it because of stability issues. I did use it to organize my tags, though. For renaming files, I think I'm going to write my own script as I have very strange (but simple) ideas about how the filestructure should be. I think Juk's renaming comes close to the ease and power of EasyTag though. Incidentally, if EasyTag did MusicBrainz, I probably never would have looked at Juk, in spite of EasyTag's odd interface. That would have been a loss, because I trust Juk (or rather, taglib) much more than I do EasyTag not to mess my files up, in spite of the lack of any experience that would cause me to distrust EasyTag.

In usability and UI design theory there's this concept of affordance. We say the button affords clicking, or the metal plate on a door affords pushing. Well the latest Firefox .dmg for OS X (Firefox 1.5) strives to make the already dog-simple installation process (drag the .app into /Applications) even easier:

Doesn't that look great? It just begs you to drag it into the Applications folder. There's only one catch: that's not the Applications folder! That's a background image. It's completely worthless. It gums up your mind and prevents you from installing it on autopilot while you try to figure out why you can't just drag it onto that Applications folder.

In my case the confusion was exacerbated because I had recently come across a .dmg that used the same tactic, except they had a symlink to /Applications in there so it actually was dog-simple to install, instead of just looking that way.

10 points for style, -20 for stupidity.