A while ago I talked about my search for a Windows music player, as Winamp was too basic and iTunes was to slow and annoying. I found Musik. I’ve been using it for a month or so now. In general I’ve been very pleased with it.

It works in a similar way to iTunes, with the familiar browse windows, search box and so on. The difference is that it is fast. Compared to iTunes, it’s blazing. My flatmate has my old PC, an AMD 450MHz job. ITunes ran horrendously slowly, but it was suffered because it is a good music player. I installed Musik on his computer the other day, and the difference is very noticable. The UI is much more responsive, searches don’t freeze the program up for thirty seconds and it is generally more smooth. Even on my PC, iTunes UI was rather juddery, so Musik is better for me too.

To those who like RealPlayer content, but don’t like RealPlayer. That’d be everyone then? Well, visit this page fill in some fake info and grab a slightly less intrusive version of the player. There’s a field where you are supposed to fill in what your “project’ is where you want to use RealPlayer. I suggest you fill in something like “Wish not to be annoyed the hell out of by other RealPlayer. Project is saving my sanity” or something along those lines. Perhaps then Real will get the idea that taking over a user’s computer is, ehm, rather damn annoying.

How very strange. I was just thumbing through the paper and there’s an advert for a Tablet PC. The strange thing is that the PC (running Windows XP) is using Redhat’s Bluecurve Linux theme… I wonder what Redhat would have to say about that?

More work on the Gnome File Selector by Seth. Most interesting in this series of mockups is the save dialog box. In my opinion, this is probably the best Save As dialog I’ve seen. I’ve always felt that the Windows Save As dialog is not very intuitive, and I think the mockup is a great solution to this.

The emphasis on the Name box makes it much more clear what you are doing than the Save box in Windows, which looks far too similar to the Load dialog box. Often, I have to take time out to check I'm in the right dialog, which I shouldn't have to do. Having the Save dialog look different to the Load dialog is a good move.

Removing the Path box is another good move. Most people store their files in a very small subset of folders, that are single-level. This means that there really isn’t any hierarchy to them. The path string therefore promotes a hierarchical principle that doesn’t exist for many people.

An interesting article in the Guardian points a finger towards selfishness, rather than a growing altruistism in society, being a reason for the growing number of public shows of mourning. I have to agree with many of the points put forward. Many people are simply using the public grief to put a face on a real grief they have for a given event. However, I think that many people simply do it because everyone else seems to be doing it. Looking like a caring individual rather than being one would seem to be more important.