Hello all, I have been reading the "Linux blows and sucks" thread and it inspired me to get down to two specifics, as requested by one of the thread responders.
These two applications are both Linux applications, so it is not a comment on windows versus Linux, but rather a comment on the habits some windows users have that one of these applications seems to be catering to (pardon the dangling participle). Amarok automatically starts the first track when it is opened and when the player is shut down, it always selects fade feature. Sound Juicer does neither of these things, but requires on start up to choose which track to play. If you want the first track to play, you just select play and the first track is started. But if say track 7 is your favourite track, you can select that right away by double clicking on it. Not only does Sound Juicer not automatically choose fade option, I did not even notice a fade option in the menu. It might be there somewhere in the menu if I looked for it, but the fade option in Amarok is just a nice little novelty to play with for a while, but one eventually gets tired of it and therefore when I went to sound juicer I did not miss it enough to look for possible ways to use it in Sound Juicer. Amarok seems to cater to people who want things done for them, so that when it starts up it automatically plays the first track. But sometimes I want to select my tracks in the order I want to hear them that day, which may change from day to day. Sound Juicer lets me do that without cancelling an automatic track one play mode. You just double click each track you want to hear when you want to hear it. And with all that automatic action on the part of Amarok, Amarok uses more resources than Sound Juicer. So, over time, I have come to love Sound Juicer more than Amarok, especially after the novelty of automatic fade wore off. Now when I want to play a CD, I always use Sound Juicer and never use Amarok. That being said, there may be people out there who prefer automatic fade and automatic first track playing. So Linux offers Amarok to those kinds of people. Then there are people like me who prefer more control rather than novelty. Linux offers Sound Juicer for people like me. So Linux offers a choice. Windows often does not offer a choice, so it is refreshing to see that Linux does offer a choice. One Windows application I like is Excel spread sheets. They allow one to use gigantic charts filling the whole page. Open office does not allow that yet. But I have seen open office to change dramatically from Open Office 2.0 to Open Office 2.4. So I am patiently waiting for Open Office developers to offer a similar choice in the future. But I got two viruses when I was running Windows and it is great not to have to worry about viruses. So I am willing to put up with puny charts until the developers decide to offer bigger charts. The loss of bigger charts is more than offset by Linux not being as vulnerable as Windows. And on the other side, my brother Mel says that as Microsoft responds to customer complaints, the new Windows is not as vulnerable as the old versions of Windows, so even Microsoft can improve its security at least a little bit. The difference is that Linux did it years before Microsoft did it, and at no cost to passive users. The main reason I did not let developers know that I wanted the option of using big charts in Open Office is that I have been too busy having fun with other applications such as sound juicer and evolution and ice weasel and firefox which are far superior to Internet Explorer and Outlook Express and the windows email client whose name I can not remember because I have not used Windows in such a long time. I also am having fun with epiphany. There are features in firefox and epiphany which are complementary. What is wrong in firefox is right in epiphany. And what is wrong in epiphany is right in firefox. Similarly Evolution and Kmail are similarly complementary. But they are all good applications. I just happen to prefer Evolution and ice weasel most of the time. I have not had much time to play around with epiphany, but I have used it a couple of times. So for browsers Linux offers three choices - epiphany, firefox, and ice weasel. I am going to set aside some more time to explore epiphany. As you can see, I spend more time exploring Linux Applications than complaining about perceived shortcomings of some of those applications. I would rather spend my time exploring than complaining. Tomorrow I have specifically put exploring epiphany on my to do list on my daily agenda. Regards, Michael _______________________________________________ clug-talk mailing list [email protected] http://clug.ca/mailman/listinfo/clug-talk_clug.ca Mailing List Guidelines (http://clug.ca/ml_guidelines.php) **Please remove these lines when replying
