Re: [GnomeMeeting-devel-list] Re: Sound events and GnomeMeeting

[Rodney Dawes <dobey free fr>]

On Sht , 2003-11-15 at 07:17, Glynn Foster wrote:
> FWIW, I agree with Andrew - it would be nice to work on killing all the
> current cruft in libgnome, and replacing it with some gstreamerish API.

I agree that the current stuff in libgnome sucks for sound events. I
don't agree that gstreamer is going to solve all those problems, though.

> On a side note, I think we should kill the sound events stuff [1], and
> just have a single sound event for 'alert'

A single alert sound is more useless than the current situation. At
least now, there is an API to set up a specific sound for a specific
event in an application. Sound event support is something that we need,
and when done well, can greatly improve usability and accessibility. It
also makes much more sense to have different sounds for different
alerts. Having a buzzer sound for new mail, instant message, or low
battery doesn't make much sense, while it may make sense for an error.
The URL below should help explain what i mean.

http://www.pixelcentric.net/x-shame/sound.html

>  - does anyone actually
> configure these things?

Yes. Just not on GNOME. :) Or at least, enabling them and not installing
gnome-audio, will at least get rid of all the annoying sounds for the
gtk+ button press events. They are useful, despite how any current API
in GNOME may lead you to believe otherwise. :)

>  AFAIKS, gnome-games is the only thing using it
> right now, especially if we're not shipping gnome-audio with the desktop
> release. I had hoped to work on this, but I got distracted by other
> stuff ;)

Lots of things use the sound events API. Gnomemeeting for example.
However, it's currently a pain to do sound events the GNOME way,
because the API has its issues, the event support is disabled by
default, and 

> I guess for now you should just go with something at an application
> level [at least, that's what gaim currently does], which I personally
> believe is the right thing to do anyway.

I think the right thing to do is to get a cross-platform/cross-desktop
standard specification for handling sound events and themes. This is
something I once sent a draft spec for to xdg-list. I would be glad to
help finish it and get it accepted as a freedesktop specification, so
that we can finally get some of these problems solved, even if it will
most likely have to wait for post-2.6 GNOME.

> [1] For screenshots of what OSX and XP does, take a look at 
>     http://www.gnome.org/~gman/sound-capplet/

Was this supposed to be an example of what not to do, or what other
desktops currently do?

-- dobey