Re: Start and Stop buttons in Media players

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

Hello Samuel,

On Thu, 2005-03-31 at 03:14 +0200, Samuel Abels wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 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

Neither Totem, nor Rhythmbox use toggle buttons, just normal buttons.

> Also, all of those application use different icons on the buttons.

Totem uses the icon in your icon theme, which is what the others should
be doing if they used GTK+ 2.6 as well :)

> 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.

As Ronald said, it's not really needed to create a widget just for that.
I'd be more interested in somebody creating a patch for Totem to try out
the toggle, as Muine is doing.

Note that I think the current HIG recommendation of having separate
buttons makes no sense at all. And that the only place that should have
a stop button is a CD player (now that applications know how to release
resources when paused).

Cheers

---
Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>