All I want is a drag-and-drop CD burner
I know I've mostly been posting code snippets here, but I originally started this site to post more in-depth tutorials. This isn't going to be one of those. I'm taking a spin and would like to say a few words on the design of good software -- the second half of this site that's been neglected.
My brother's girlfriend asked me to burn some files for her using her laptop the other day, so I tried. I didn't think it would be so difficult.
So I popped in the blank disc, and iTunes came up, exclaiming that it could burn stuff for me. Fine, I'll try that. It told me I had to create a new playlist (Why? I'm just going to delete it in 5 seconds). So I did. And then I tried to drag and drop my videos onto the playlist. Nothing. Okay. Let's dig through the menus: "Add to playlist"? No. "Import files"? No. It looks to me like I have to add the files to my library, then search for those files that I just added, figure out how to add them to my newly created playlist, burn them, and then delete the playlist I didn't want in the first place. Brilliant. Except I couldn't figure that out, and I still haven't the faintest idea how to use iTunes. Call me idiot, iTune-lovers, but software really shouldn't take more than about 3 minutes to figure out how to do what you want with it.
Next I tried ImgBurn, something a friend recommended to me, which was indeed great for burning images, as the name suggests, but pretty horrid at burning a list of files. Fail.
I eventually just went into "My Computer" and dragged some files on it. Windows told me I had to format the CD (it was rewriteable) first. Fine. That took an extraordinarily long time, and then finally when it started burning it told me it would be finished in 0 seconds, but it literally took between thirty minutes and an hour. I know her drive isn't that slow, it's a new computer.
CDBurnerXP has worked great in the past for me, but apparently it's a failure on Windows 7. The "used space" bar was just plain wrong, and when I tried telling it that it was an idiot, it threw a fit and crashed.
Nero was good, back in the day, until they figured out they were getting popular and thought they could get away with adding whatever crapware they wanted. Now I just refuse to support their bullshit.
All I wanted to do was to drag-and-drop some files onto a program window, list them for me, and tell me how much space I've got left. Click burn, and that's it. Don't touch my files, don't convert them, don't move, copy, sort, cache or archive them. Don't install useless crap on my computer, and don't have me six thousand features I don't need.
Give me what I want. Make it big, bold, obvious, easy to find. And make it do what it's supposed to do when I click it. No more, no less. Is that so hard? Why can't people develop nice, clean, simple, intuitive UIs? We're not asking you to invent anything new, just take what's already been done, and works, and use that. There's frameworks for it. Use them!