Scrolling "seek" sliders

["James \"Doc\" Livingston" <doclivingston gmail com>]

G'day everyone,

Currently various multi-media application behave differently when the
"scrolling" (up/down arrow, page up/down mouse wheel) actions are
performed on their seek slider. There have been bugs (at least 164351
and 330570) filed against several applications asking that they behave
like others, and it would be good to have consistent behaviour.

Essentially the questions is what should happen when the user performs
these actions? Should the "up" actions seek forward in time, seek back
in time, or do nothing?


Currently Totem and Gnome Sound Recorder map "up" to seek forwards in
time, Sound-Juicer and Rhythmbox map "up" to seek back in time, and
Banshee and Muine don't seek when the user does this.

Which is correct is a matter of debate, and when I started a discussion
about this on #gnome-hackers (which obviously isn't filled with "average
users") a while back, people seemed to be split roughly equally between
the options.


Some of the point for up=forwards are:
* people associate up with increasing the time from the start


Some of the point for up=backwards are:
* people associate up with increasing the time remaining (only
applicable if it's shown to the user)
* people associate up with "going towards the start", like for
documents/web pages

Some of the point for taking no action:
* these are "vertical" scroll events and the slider is horizontal, so
should do nothing


Regardless of which is generally considered "best", I think having it
consistent between application is important.



Cheers,

James "Doc" Livingston
--
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and Rodulf, Witch-King of Angmar. -- Joseph Michael Bay