Re: The Bango Project

[Sri Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>]

Have you started a discussion on xdg-list about this?  I think this kind
of thing would be great!  SOunds in GNOME have always kind of sucked.
It would be nice to get some talented people recruited into making some
neat sounds.

sri


On Thu, 2006-04-13 at 22:56 -0400, Jon Bolt wrote:
> 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.
> 
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-- 
Sri Ramkrishna <sri aracnet com>