Di ing Disco

Rory Prior has some not-so-nice things to say about Disco, and I agree with most of his a e ment. While everyone else seems to be jumping on the Disco bandwagon, I'm ho ing off. Disco is a CD/DVD burning a that positio itself as a viable, better-looking and much le expe ive replacement for Roxio's Toast. After ending a week with Disco, I am once again hungry for Toast.

Rory says Disco is the "triumph of eye candy over usability." That's a good start at what's wrong with it, but the much-hyped "eye candy" itself really proves the point that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. To my eyes, this is one ugly a . Its looks actually make it le usable, in fact. Smoke scree and shooting flame effects don't impre me much when the a doe 't do what it is intended to do exceptionally well - and Disco really fails at that task. Disco is a triumph of is hype over deservedne . Let me add that I was one of the many who pre-ordered Disco when it first started it's viral marketing campaign. For $5 I'm not saying I didn't get my money's worth, but I wouldn't have purchased it at any price had I tried the beta demo before handing over the cash.

One of the first things that struck me is that the UI is inco istent and confusing. The glo y black-and-gray tra lucent theme is only interesting to look at for the first 5 seconds of the first launch. After that I found myself staring at it and noticing how una ealing it really was. Thinking an a 's UI is ugly normally wouldn't di uade me from using it as long as the a performed well, but It took me a good minute to figure out how and at what point to name the disc I was about to burn, which is not a good sign. In fact, the very first disc I burned ended up being named "Untitled" because I forgot to name it at all. I wouldn't have forgotten if Disco had prompted me at some point or had a visually obvious place for me to have named it. But with all that tra lucent black and gray everything just looks muddy on my busy desktop and the title field just blends in with the rest of it.

Prior also says he's impre ed by Disco's "simplicity and functionality." But I don't see it as being simplistic or functional - at least not in the ways I've come to expect from a media burning a lication. The second thing to strike me was that Disco didn't recognize my .toast image as an image and i tead burned it as a straight data file. Once again, there was no obvious prompt at any point to alert me to exactly what kind of disk I was about to burn. The DMG file I tested was recognized properly and I su ect I could have renamed the .toast file to avoid the first i ue, but I shouldn't have to. If Disco is going to compete with Toast in any meaningful way, it should at least recognize Toast images and know what to do with them.

The one feature I do like is the Discography function, which could be very helpful, although I will admit to not having even really played with it yet - but the andex feature for a ing data acro multiple discs failed miserably for me every time, litting up grou of data in odd ways, wasted a lot of disc ace and didn't allow me to lit a single file acro multiple CDs.

Before I get flamed to high heaven, I am fully aware that Disco is currently in BETA and it's not a final release candidate. Some of my gripes may be addre ed in future builds. The above i 't intended to be an in-depth review, either. But Disco toots its own horn the loudest about the user interface and that's the one feature that makes it hardest for me to use. The visual effects are impre ive from a development standpoint but they seem to focus more on form and far le on function. Here's to hoping Disco dances its way into better shape before version 1.0.