Serpentine 0.6 released

Cairo will antialiase it.

That's bug. I will fix it and create a brown bag release in a few ours.

Thanks for the comments ;) I hope you like using it.

Damn... I'm sorry, I forgot to include the muine plugin in the Makefile.am so it wasn't distributed in the tarball. You can get it from the SVN version or wait a few hours for the brown-papper-bag release.

People who have nothing but negative comments, no matter what kind of quality the app in question is. Usually, these people don't really "get it". They comment based on initial knee-jerk reactions without bothering to search beyond what laboured through their head in the first 0.212 seconds that they were reading the headline for any shred of utility that might come of the app in question. This post is a prime example. Let me answer.

K3B is KDE. Serpentine is not.

It really is that simple. I'll elaborate though. K3B uses QT widgets, and sports a bloated, poorly-designed UI. It does what it's supposed to, but at the cost of a ridiculous amount of disk space and usability. It's an eyesore to the point that I'm embarrassed to install it on any of my computers. "sudo apt-get install k3b" results in a monsterous list of dependencies that are going to have to go on, most of which are KDE or QT related. It also features NO integration whatsoever with ANY Gnome media player.

So basically, I could install K3B and give up a hundred megs of disk space in dependencies that will be used for K3B only, and in the event that I do decide to do this I'll only be able to burn CDs when nobody else is looking due to the embarrassing clutter-fest of a UI that uses different widgets than EVERYTHING else on my desktop, has a different font rendering engine, and sticks out like a sore thumb due to theming differences. Think Adobe Acrobat here...nobody likes it for a reason.

I pride myself in having a desktop that looks slick. I have friends who have nearly dropped their iBooks running OSX when they saw my desktop. My DE of choice is Gnome, and my music player of choice is Muine. Both use GTK, both are clean and organized, use modern simplistic UIs, and both of them look good. Why should my burner be any different?

Serpentine allows me to burn playlists straight from my music player. It uses the same icons and same widget set that the rest of my desktop uses. It seems a natural fit for my environment: clean, tightly integrated, and intuitive to the point of requiring almost no effort to use.

K3B works, but it's a visual abortion, and will require I install unacceptable amounts of dependencies. Serpentine works, looks good, and doesn't depend on anything to do with QT. Why WOULDN'T you use it?

K3B is a multi propose application for writing data, audio and mixed CDs, video and data DVDs. It's UI has a generalist approach, which means that it uses the same environment for all of these tasks.

Serpentine is focused on the real opposite: the Unix spirit. Every application should be good at doing one task, I mean really good at doing it, and it should make it easy to integrate with other applications.

With this in mind you gain a very simple user interface and a focused propose. If you want to write Audio-CD's you're better of using Serpentine since it's faster and easier. Also integrating serpentine is very easy, just have a look at the Muine plugin (which is written in C#, Serpentine is in Python).

But in the end is all about choice, so you don't need bother ;)

That's a really nice comment, very supporting...
Do you know that k3b is only a frontend so it's not as if they have to rewrite everything just for integration but it really makes sense to write an integrated frontend in you own toolkit.

People who can't afford to go out and spend >=$300 on an iPod. :: ducks and runs :: ;-)

--
"It is better for people to think you are a fool, then for you to open your mouth and remove all doubt."

Wow, that is insane. What is the reasoning behind this, other than being money grubbing bastards?

--
"It is better for people to think you are a fool, then for you to open your mouth and remove all doubt."