After hearing about the much-ballyhooed and controversial disc-burning app Disco, I finally decided to take it for a spin around the block. First, note that this isn’t a full review but a quick-and-dirty review of my first impressions with this collection of compiled Objective-C code (being I’ve only used it a couple times), so there won’t be a score or anything. Onward!

Shiny.

If there’s one word I could use to describe Disco, it’s transparent! By default, this looks pretty against a clean desktop; but when there’s text below it, it can start looking very messy and somewhat muddled.

Top: Disco on a clean desktop. Bottom: Disco on a messy desktop.

The worst part of the transparency is that each application window is transparent, so if you have Disco windows overlapping and several other apps open, you get something like this:

Mmm, poor readability.

Granted, I had to overlap five windows to get it to look like this, but even with two windows it does get messy. There is an option to turn off the transparency, leaving a white-on-black interface which seems to be a little harsh on my eyes.

Talk about an identity crisis.

Anther thing of note is the progress bars. While I could tell the difference between the “complete” portion and “incomplete” portion, the contrast between the two segments is not nearly enough. Also, I could have sworn the progress bars on the disc verification screen were buttons, not progress bars, complete with rounded corners. My machine, unfortunately (or fortunately, as some would say) does not have enough graphics horsepower for the smoke effect.

Discos’ web site has the following to say about the smoke:

Everything about Disco is pushing the boundaries of interface, usability, and utter functional simplicity. Well, once you realize that Disco is emitting real time 3D interactive smoke as you burn, we start redefining the boundaries.

Um, why? I’m no crusty grizzled computer veteran who still thinks green text on black screens is the way to go, but I can’t quite wrap my head around why any developer of a disc-burning app would spend the time to implement smoke rising from the window when a disc is burning as opposed spending that time focusing on the application’s guts or other aspects of the UI. Redefining the boundaries, indeed. Yes, make a high-quality user interface. Yes, make it fun and beautiful. But don’t go over the top.

It may seem silly to some that so far I have nit-picked the user interface to pieces, but considering that the user interface is the application to most users, I think it’s time well spent.

That said, there are some nice clever touches to the interface. For example, when you are burning a disc, an animated spinning disc appears in the window. A nice little subtle touch that I actually like is that when a Disco window is selected, the drop shadow fades in over a half second or so, so it actually looks like the the window is rising up. Likewise, when a Disco window becomes inactive, the drop shadow fades out, giving it the impression that the window is sinking (there is still a slight drop shadow when the window is inactive, like every other OS X app out there). I’m not yet sure what I think of the window view sliding from one pane to another, but it works.

Finder burning and a little more

Disco does pack a fair amount of features into its simplistic interface (gratuitous eye candy aside). It does allow for disc burning sessions, disc-spanning if what you’re burning is too big for one disk (they call it “Spandex"--those clever developers!), and burning disk images, among other features. Also, Disco includes a feature called “Discography” which lists a compilation of the discs you burn. Unfortunately I have yet to figure out any way to make the Discography say anything more than the discs I have burned so far.

So how does it stack up? In my brief experimenting with Disco, I think it’s a fun app with a decent amount of functionality. Some of the eye candy is absolutely worthless, and I would like it if the developers would tone that down a bit (like use a clean white or light-colored background instead of the transparent black, it would very Apple-esque) and maybe turn the smoke off by default (you can turn it off if you want). For the average user who needs more burning capabilities than the Finder offers and are intimidated by other disc-burning apps, Disco might be worth a look, despite its UI caveats.