Bonfire - killer burning app
I’ll make a short review of fairly new disc burning application for Gnome desktop Bonfire, because I think it deserves a praise and those of you who read my blog should try it out. You are probably asking yourself what is so special about this application, well I’ll show you.
It’s designed with two things in mind, simplicity and usability. You can tell this by looking at this picture, which is the first thing you see when you run it. All in the spirit of Gnome philosophy.
You can select a type of project you’d like to start with one click from here. The user interface may seem too simple at first, but do not hesitate to navigate the View menu and select a Viewer(file preview), File chooser, Search(integrated Beagle search) or Playlist which will show up on the right side as kind of a side bar.
One of the key features of this app in my opinion is the Beagle Search integration. No more awkward navigation through your folders, looking for files you want to burn. I hope you understand how useful this feature is, you can simply type in a keyword(s) of what would you like to burn and files will show up. You can filter before searching “text documents”, “music”, “pictures”, “video” and then filter the results by type. If you have a preview area visible it shows you a preview of your searched pictures showing thumbnail, you can listen to your music files and even preview video files(using Totem integration). You can add files to project by dragging them or copy/paste from Nautilus file browser, double click them or drag them from side bar on the right, clicking on add button, what ever suits you.
The burn dialogs are simple, on the point, showing relevant information and options. The blanking is handled in a smart way and all the dialog messages are Gnome HIG and well designed.
When Bonfire is in the burning process tray icon appears, you can hide burning dialog in there and the icon is nicely showing the completed percentage and time remaining.
Burning capabilities are very good by my first impression, I burned a few CD/DVDs with no problem, erased a DVD-RW, appended to previous DVD session. I had an issue with my mini DVD-RW disc though, I couldn’t erase it, but I’m sure the handling mini CD/DVDs will be fixed in future releases. What I didn’t get into is the Playlist interface, I guess if you have music playlists you can import them and then burn what ever you have in your playlist.
I’m very impressed with this piece of code so far, I see the future of Gnome burning applications is bright. If you follow the GnomeBaker development you will notice it’s going in the same direction. Bonfire is using cdrtools and cdrdao for burning backend(which the author says could become a library in the future), i.e. not using nautilus-cd-burner or cdrecord(like GnomeBaker).
I believe K3b will soon get a worthy opponent in CD/DVD mastering area.
). Would you see any problem to that ?