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RSSInspiration reset
It’s funny how it goes. You use stuff, you find it useful, and you consider it pretty good. Then you use something else and a gap appears — what was pretty good now looks like crap, and you realize that your perception was warped. It happens to me all the time, and the resets are really cool. When I get a glimpse at something I really like, it refreshes my spidey senses and kicks my ass. And that’s a good thing.
So I spend most of my time in Windows Land. It’s ok. I’ve even pimped out my development machines with every tool I need. Then I boot my Ubuntu system at home and it kicks my ass. This is what real tools look like. I browse AmieStreet for some new tunes, and it kicks my ass again. It’s what browsing music should be like. Suddenly I’m inspired again. I queue up some tunes in Rhythembox, and it’s what iTunes should be like. Simple, solid, and does what I want. There’s inspiration everywhere, I just have to remember not to get stuck in the crap.
I’m tempted to buy a license of VMWare so I can boot my Windows development partition from a productive environment.
March 31st, 2007 at 12:07 pm
It’s funny how two people can have completely different opinions on something. I tried Rhythmbox for a while and wanted to like it, but in the end I came to the opposite conclusion: iTunes was the way Rhythmbox should be. :)
March 31st, 2007 at 4:38 pm
iTunes on Windows is among the best for the platform, but I find the iTunes interface noisy, and the integrated store is horrid. Now of course the store is worse since a recent update hosed it (every second click returns an error), but even the fact that it’s a browser that isn’t a browser is annoying enough. It acts like a browser most of the time, just enough that when it doesn’t you’re surprised.
When I booted back to Ubuntu/Gnome/Linux this morning, I remembered what a simple, functional client was like. It found all of my new music (something that iTunes is very bad at), and found all of my duplicate/moved music automagically. No fuss, no mess. iTunes, OTOH has a weird way of adding new albums to it if they’re not from the iTunes store, and it’s quite persistent about the DRMed songs (finding them on your iPod if you’ve freed them).
On OS X, it’s better, especially if you only use their store and an iPod. But that’s still a bit much koolaid for me …