waffle

The positions put forward by Rory Prior and Paul Kafasis are thought-provoking. What they’re discussing is this month’s phenomenom, the new disc burning app Disco.

It pains me a bit to see this negative publicity about Disco, because there’s a lot of things Disco does right. If you’re going to need four discs to burn all that data, it says so up front. If you want to know what, exactly, it’s doing when it’s “finishing” or “closing”, it lays out some progress bars and shows you. If you want to know what particular set of alphabet soup fisheries your burner supports, it shows you. It’s not dumbed down, it’s just shown more clearly. The file managing UI leaves a lot (a lot!) to be desired, but all in all it’s a nicer experience than I’ve had with the Finder, or with Disk Utility, or with Toast, or with Nero or Roxio or any number of shareware/freeware apps back on Windows.

What, exactly, are Paul and Rory concerned about? That Mac applications are now sold by sizzle, not by steak. That Disco eschews standard UI widgets almost entirely and has panels that aren’t resizable that should be resizable (again, file-managing UI). Those two concerns are not to be dismissed easily, but in my mind they are missing the point. Disco has its fair share of sizzle, but it’s also got a lot of steak. It does its job and it does it well and most of the sizzle actually add to the functionality, which is almost unheard of in terms of apps that get praise for their looks.

At the end of the day, I like the Disco UI and others don’t. I’m fine with that, but what upsets me a little is that people throw Disco in a pile of apps that are sizzle, not steak, or that have horrible UIs that are also built with chiefly non-standard UI widgets.