Planned "Sound Settings" improvements

[David Henningsson <david henningsson canonical com>]

Hi!

Over the coming months, I'm planning to make some improvements to the 
"Sound Settings" dialog. While my primary target is the upcoming Ubuntu 
12.04 release, I believe it will be of mutual benefit if this 
functionality also becomes part of GNOME.

To give you some background, I've been working on PulseAudio patches for 
jack detection the last few months. Upstreaming of these patches are in 
progress and will be a part of PulseAudio 2.0. These patches also make 
PulseAudio expose more information, that makes it possible for us to 
make the Sound Settings UI more user friendly.

The main point of the redesign is to remove the hardware tab, and have 
input and output tabs incorporate the information currently on the 
hardware tab. There should be one row for every combination of 
Port/Connector and Card, rather than today's practice of one row for 
every card and a combobox for "Connector". The point is that since the 
average user would think of "Headphones" and "Speakers" rather than 
"Internal Audio Analog Stereo", we should present 
Headphones/Speakers/etc to the user as the first thing he/she sees.

There is a small mockup here:
http://people.canonical.com/~diwic/sound-settings/gvc_ui_final.jpg
The two bottom checkboxes will likely be removed. You should see it more 
as "what" will be on the picture rather than "where".

While GNOME might not want to have this feature before PulseAudio 2.0 is 
released, I figured it'd be better to be too early to keep you in the 
loop, than too late. So I'm reaching out to hear, well first and 
foremost if this is something you're interested in, and if so, what help 
is available when it comes to things such as making upstreaming to GNOME 
go as smooth as possible. While I believe I can write most of the code, 
I'm not used to the GNOME release cycle and workflow.

As for getting the pixels right, I'm not a visual designer myself, but I 
can probably get some help with that from within Canonical. (Also, 
moving something two pixels down or rephrase a string, is of course 
something you can change quite easy, should it not suit your preferences.)

Btw, should you be interested in discussing this with me personally, you 
can reach me in Prague next week for GStreamer and Linux conferences, 
and at Ubuntu Developer Summit the week after that.

Some additional pointers:
 * 
http://voices.canonical.com/david.henningsson/2011/09/06/pulseaudio-with-jack-detection/
 * 
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2011-October/003344.html
 * If you were at the desktop summit, this was briefly discussed at 
Colin's talk: 
https://desktopsummit.org/program/sessions/pulseaudio-control-and-command-state-desktop-integration-gnome-kde

--
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
http://launchpad.net/~diwic