The Bango Project

["Jon Bolt" <jon wordescapes co uk>]

The Bango Project

Original forum post
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=919723#post919723

Also this can be found on the ubuntu wiki here
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bango
http://freedesktop.org/wiki/Bango
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=338399
http://tango-project.org/Bango


I was changing the sounds on my computer today, and realized what a drag
is was. I m often not at my computer 100% of the time, even though it is
on, and so i need alerts to tell me when i have a new email or IM message,
or for other reasons.

Anyway, I got thinking about why there is no gnome sound theme available,
you can change the individual files for notifications etc in preferences >
sounds, but this isn't great, I really don't want to go through and select
each file. What i really want is to download a theme of gnome-look.org or
something similar, and just drag it onto the theme manager, and let it
install all the files for me.

The big trouble with this right now is there is no specification that I
know of for desktop sounds. I may be wrong here.

Then I got thinking a little more, about the tango project. This has been
great, it not only creating a detailed specification allowing applications
to share common icons, i want the same play button on all my media
applications!, but it also provides guidance on the design of icons, how
to use shadows or colours for instance.

So what had this got to do with sounds files? Well I had a thought that it
would be really cool if a similar effort sound be set up for sounds on
computers. For computer newbies, sounds can be a great way to provide
feedback on their actions, making the gulf between a real world action
action and its results on screen seem smaller from a user perspective.

So I am proposing the bango project, why bango? well, sounds like tango
for one thing, and bango - kinda like making a noise with the bang part.
Mind you, i am open to suggestions for the name

What would this project do? Well for one thing provide useful guidance on
how to match events on the screen to sounds. How should someone create a
sound event for an email arriving, or for when an application crashes, or
when a user logs in.

The project should also be responsible for carrying our usability testing
on a range of users. Making sure these sounds themes enhance the users
computing experience.

Most importantly however, the group should work with freedesktop.org to
produce a specification for sounds themes, similar to the tango project.
This will allow the project to span multiple desktop environments like
tango. If a developer wanted a sound for a particular event for their app,
say the email arriving again, just use the notification-email.flac file.

The group should also be responsible for promoting the use of open codecs
for the sounds files, ogg or flac for example.

So why all the bother? Well because I feel it would make the life of
people migrating to open source software like Linux that little bit
easier. Having common consequences for actions can allow the user to
bridge semantically similar actions, which may be syntactically different.

Anyway, this is really just me putting this idea out there, maybe there's
similar projects right now, i dunno, but i guess let the community decide
if this is important enough to be considered.