Re: Start and Stop buttons in Media players

["Ronald S. Bultje" <rbultje ronald bitfreak net>]

Hi,

On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 03:14, Samuel Abels wrote:
> Also, all of those application use different icons on the buttons.

If you mean the image, Gtk has stock icons GTK_STOCK_MEDIA_*). If you
mean the image type (pause/play vs. stop/play), well, that's the same
issue if you ask me. See below.

> The issue came up several times before and I believe most will agree now
> that consensus is impossible. Short story is, the
> Start/Stop/Pause(/Record) buttons behave inconsistently over
> applications, mostly because an agreement was not possible so far.
> 
> E.g.:
> 
> Muine: Start/Stop Toggle button, not changing symbol
> Totem: Start/Pause Toggle button, changing symbol
> Rhythmbox: Start/Pause Toggle button, changing symbol

(http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164037 for Totem.)

> Instead of asking application developers to implement one specific
> behaviour we could provide a MediaButton widget with Start/Stop/Play/etc
> callbacks. Depending on some gconf keys, the widget could display one or
> two buttons, send different callbacks and implement the proper
> behaviour.

*Way* overengineered if you ask me. :). We're talking about one single
button here.

I see the point of inconsistency, and you're right in that respect. Now,
I still think there are more serious issues for me to work on, first,
and I don't know for Bastien.  Basically, if you ask me, the behaviour
that RB and Totem show is very much so consistent, and makes sense.
Muine tries to do it differently, which is OK. If we'd change Totem,
we'd have to change RB, too, so that they stay consistent. So let's
analyze those differences (Totem/RB vs. Muine):

So we have:
- play/pause vs. play/stop as behaviour
- toggle button changing state vs. a button with a changing icon

First issue, play/pause vs. play/stop as behaviour: debatable for the
audio player (it's a jukebox, you turn it on/off, right?). Insane for
the video player (I pause the movie halfway to make a coke, and I do not
want to start back at the beginning after that!). If you want to stay
consistent, that means you have to go for play/pause, for both.

Toggle button vs. icon button: this is a pure matter of taste. If
someone writes a patch for me to play with the toggle button, I'll do
it. I probably won't even notice the difference. :). Sounds fair to me,
and if it really rocks or sucks, I'll say so. Maybe Bastien has harder
opinions on this.

Ronald

-- 
Ronald S. Bultje <rbultje ronald bitfreak net>