Guest Review of ViTunes
Ladies and Gentlemen, we bring you, once again, the zombified remains of Richard M. Stallman, or ZRMS.1
ZRMS has joined us today to review a product that is right up his metaphorical alley, a product, that, like himself, is from somewhere out in left field. Welcome to ZRMS’ review of ViTunes, the Vim interface to iTunes.
Hello readers all. When tackling a project like reviewing a relatively obscure program that enables users of an aging open source tool to control a completely closed source and slightly anti-competitive music player, one doesn’t just slap a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” on it and walk away whistling. It’s really hard to whistle after death, for one thing. Just don’t have the elasticity for it any more. A product like this deserves close attention, like a hapless cheerleader who’s been separated from the pack and secretly takes AP classes, so her brain is crammed full of facts, but not ones that would help her right now, like “How to avoid getting your brain eaten before taking the SAT, because that will definitely keep you out of college”. But where was I? Oh yes, ViTunes.
Now, on the surface, this is a marriage made in hell. And those just don’t last. Look at it: Vim is a staple of open source programmers, a geek badge of courage, a sign that you are a true hacker in the old sense, and that you live life on the command line. iTunes is a music player with completely closed source code and a lot of DRM still floating around inside it, locking users to their Macs like a spiritual ball and chain. The two shouldn’t have anything to do with one another. So, if we were to score the program on the sheer “making sense” scale, it’d have to get a negative two.
And then there’s the potential user base scale. A venn diagram of Vim users and iTunes users would be two circles that have a microscopic overlap, something like three angstroms or less. so, on the “look I’ve got a potential market” scale we get a nice round zero, because nobody’s going to get mad at you for making this product.
But there’s a deeper level here, something that overrides all these other considerations. The Challenge. Any real hacker knows what I mean. You program in Vim on your Mac. you like Vim, you like your Mac, and you like to listen to music. But why should you have to use any extra keystrokes to change songs or whatever? Sure, you could use something flashy like LaunchBar or Quicksilver to change songs from the keyboard, but you’ve spent all this time learning Vim and telling everyone how productive you are when you use it, so it’s time to put your money where your mouth is, isn’t it?
That’s The Challenge. You need to make a program that will save you precious milliseconds. The programming effort will doubtlessly be orders of magnitude greater than the reward, but you’ll do it because it’s just possible you can, and you have to find out. You’re going to take the oldest and least user friendly text editor ever and the newest and least programmer friendly music player and make them work together. And for this I raise my hat to you. Well, my scalp. It fits like a hat these days. So same difference. On the “taking on and completing The Challenge” scale you, dear programmer, get 400 out of ten points. You are awesome, and we are proud to include you in our ranks.
The ranks of true hackers, that is, not the growing ranks of the undead. That day will come soon enough.
And there you have it, insightful, witty, and ever so slightly terrifying. Everything that we’ve come to expect from ZRMS.
