cynthiune

Free software and romantic music player for GNUstep

Cynthiune (january 2004) ========= What is Cynthiune? ------------------ Cynthiune is a free software and romantic music player for GNUstep and MacOSX. I wrote it originally as a christmas gift to a girl that I liked because she could not listen to music on her Mac with a free program. Since then, I decided to make it public and add even more features to make it a complete and useable media player. For the moment, it looks pretty much like XMMS, Winamp and similar software. Even though it has far less features than those, the essential components of a usable and user-friendly program are there in my opinion. From a programmatic point-of-view, I have decided to write a program that is released only when considered bug-free. The free software community lacks, IMnsHO, a sense of quality that makes its programs nearly useless to lambda users. Not only is it useless, but I think it also gives free software a bad reputation. The principle of freedom in "free software" is fundamental to me, but it has to be reachable not only by some sort of geeky elite. There is no point in telling users that since they have the freedom to enhance those programs, they must fix them if they want to use them. Releasing a program with too many bugs is of no use and is likely not to interest other fellow programmers in the community either. On the other hand, Apple has published an interesting program called "iTunes". Of course, it is not free software but it does implement interesting ideas that I would like to include in Cynthiune. For example: CD burning, complete playlist management, etc... Personally I find its user interface to be not as user-friendly as it could be. My plan is thus to take advantage of my own programming skills and sense of aesthetics (and ergonomy) to try to write something a little bit different, inspired both by XMMS/Winamp and iTunes. Cynthiune is thus currently very basic but its core design is starting to be extensible enough that it will not be too much trouble to enhance it.

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