Just when I lauded GNOME for (slowly) moving in the right direction, the GNOMEs failed me: I heard that the Nautilus CD Burner was dropped in favor of a "traditional" CD burning application. Oh ungrateful world!
This will teach me not to trust Swiss bankers.
Wait, wrong link... Let's try again: this will teach me not to trust mythical creatures characterized by their extremely small size and subterranean lifestyle. That's better.
I briefly blabbered about this in my article on DeepaMehta: traditional applications just do not make sense. No really, they don't. No sense at all.
I do not believe there was ever actually any technical or otherwise practical reason for having applications. Rather, it's just nuclear fallout from the proprietary software world: when one has a compulsive need for selling "products" (I'm convinced it is some kind of mania -- all that talk about business model is just alibi :-) ), then one needs to offer something tangible; something that the lemmings using it can associate with the neat (for some value of "neat") package they got from the maniac... err, I mean vendor -- and probably shelled out some money for. (Pun not intended, honestly :-) )
This is an exquisite demonstration of how formidably the proprietary model fails to produce real value; how the vendors' interests work in perfect opposition against the users': what we really want are *not* clearly distinguished applications. Quite the reverse: we want additional functionality to integrate as seamlessly as ever possible; to become an organic part of the system -- to become unexistent as an entity of its own. And in a free software world, once the proprietary "product" fallout clears, we can indeed attain this goal.
So, what's this about nuclear fallout; where does this applied hate come from, err I mean that hate against applications? Just what makes them such a first-order nuclear meltdown? Quite simple: it's just too many shells.
(Don't get me wrong -- I actually like seafood ;-) )
A shell, in this context, is the part of an application that reads interactive user commands, and invokes the corresponding functionality -- the spell casting interpreter so to say. But why does every application need it's own shell? Winning hint: It doesn't. There is really no good reason. Unless you like pain -- plenty of that in here. A genuine pain factory indeed.
For starters, having many shells naturally breeds inconsistence. (It's indeed a law of nature. Goes by the name of Entropy.)
Even if you mange -- by threats, pleas and bribes -- to keep the actual interfaces consistent, the user experience inevitably still will be inconsistent: simply because of having to open the same file in various applications to do certain things on it. There is no escaping the pain.
Multiple shells also inevitably result in redundancy; and thus bloat, confusion, and more pain in general: it is never quite clear which functionality best should be accessible from which shell. There is always a tendency to add more and more stuff to each one, to avoid the situation where you have to use another shell (application) just for this one feature...
This also goes for the main system shell, i.e. the file manager: which functionality should be available there? Surely it's useful to have a preview of images for example; but once you have that, how about slide shows? Or functionality to rotate images? And once you have rotation, why not other editing features? Where to stop?
The obvious answer is: don't stop at all. (Well, it is obvious, isn't it?... :-) ) Just put all the functionality in the main shell, thus avoiding the need for any other ones.
This way, there are no applications in the traditional sense anymore. All additional software just plugs into the main navigation facility. (Normally the file manager, though theoretically other object systems are possible as well... Except that using anything but the file system as the primary facility for managing objects, is probably an idea almost as bad as applications :-) )
If you install an SVG editor for example, you just get the SVG editing abilty available from the main shell. Simple and consistent -- no more pain. Life is good.
