Acoustica CD/DVD Label Maker - Manual (Page 2)

Welcome to our help file. If you're looking for help with a particular problem, we suggest you
start at the Help Contents page. This section is more or less a philosophical overview of
Acoustica CD/DVD Label Maker. If you're leaning forward in your chair right now, pupils
dilated, mouse in a deathgrip, all because of something you haven't been able to figure out
how to do - see the Help Contents. WelcomeIf you're reclining peacefully, with a comforting
beverage beside you and perhaps one hand thoughtfully stroking your chin - read on.
Our Goals
Acoustica's mission is to make fun, quality, easy to use software. We want Acoustica CD/DVD
Label Maker to be a program that never makes you want to swear at your computer or throw
your monitor out the window. We want to help you get your CD labels made quickly and enjoy
doing it. And we want to help you bring out your creative side, even if you don't think you have
one.
One of the first things we realized is that if you want to be able to get where you need to go
and try all the things you want to try, you need to have your tools handy. You don't want to
have to weed through menus and nested subdialogs and hieroglyphic-laden, randomly
arranged toolbars to get at the image or tool you're looking for. When you were four years old
and you set out to color a picture, you set your paper in front of you and dumped all your
crayons out beside it. Everything you needed was in easy reach. You didn't put all your red
crayons in one of the kitchen drawers, your blue crayons in a box in the attic, and your green
crayons under the bed at your friend's house across town. That would have been stupid. That
would have been the sort of thing that - and I blush to say so, because I belong to this category
- a programmer would do. We've tried to avoid the programmer's way and, instead, keep all
your tools just a click away so the program doesn't get in the way when you're in a creative
trance (you're in those all the time, right?). For more details on our approach to tools and
general program layout, see Getting Around in Acoustica CD/DVD Label Maker.
Our Process
"The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas."
--Linus Pauling
My fellow Acousticans loved it when I brought in a new version of the program with some
important new feature. They seemed to think it was one of those carnival booths where you
throw darts at the rows of balloons until you pop the one with the prize behind it. "I don't think
this is clear," one of them might say. (Pop!) "It's too hard to find this button," might say another.
(Pop!) "You need to be a techie to figure this out," a third might add. (Pop! Pop! Pop!)
Eventually, having reduced the program to rubble, we'd agree on what seemed to be the
clearest, simplest way to access whatever feature we were adding, and I'd head back to my
code editor. I soon figured that I could shorten this process by making us all argue over how to
add a feature before I wrote a version to try. This would be like having my Acousticohorts help
set up the booth, so that they knew beforehand which balloon hid the prize. Surely this would
reduce the carnage. But you know what? It didn't change a thing. The same people who swore
oaths over the best way to arrange the tabs in the print dialog would violently disagree as soon
as they saw it in action. Some things, it would seem, like program interfaces and living room
paint colors, just have to be tried out before you know what works.
And so, at least partly because of this, it's taken more than a year to bring this program to you.
Not that I'm complaining. The painstaking process we've gone through has helped us create a
Page 2 of 85
6/13/2006 file://C:\acoustica\cdlabelmaker\help\cd-label-maker-flat.htm