A Man and his Penguin

Using Audacity to edit this week’s podcast, I’ve realised that I hate GTK 1 Open/Save dialog boxes.

The ones in XMMS and gTranscode are almost Windows 3.1-esque, how the directories are displayed in one panel and the files in another. The one in Audacity is also bad, in a different way. The files which start with capital letters come first, followed by the files which start with lowercase letters. So, for instance, a folder named "Videos" will come before a folder named "music", due simply to the capitalisation. Hardly untuitive, and even now it gives me moments of "I’m SURE I put that file in this folder!".

And having to set up a script to disable ESD, wait a couple of seconds then start Audacity is not exactly elegent. I mean, Audacity uses GTK, which is a Gnome project. How come they didn’t forsee that Audacity might actually be used on a Gnome desktop, and therefore have it automatically turn off ESD? Or, better yet, have ALSA support as the default, rather than an optional extra to specify when compiling the program? (and Come On, Debian; ALSA has been around for a fair while and is a reliable piece of software; why not compile Audacity with the ALSA flag?)

Final thing: If you’re one of the few who went out today and bought a copy of Windows Vista, then shame on you.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 1:23 am and is filed under Open-source application software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.