Volume widget comments



Hi all,

I'm going to discuss here about what I said in comment 12 on
http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=415775


> Comment #13 from Aaron Bockover  (developer, points: 15) 
> 2007-03-08 00:08 UTC [reply]  
> The widget does allow for clicking and then adjusting the volume, like a normal
> scale. It also allows click+drag+release to adjust. It has a tooltip to show
> the actual volume level and the theme icons do a decent job of showing relative
> volume level (mute, min, med, max).
> 
> If this widget were like F-Spot's zoom widget, there would be no widget - you'd
> just use a regular slider. Part of the point of this widget is to be more
> compact and it also looks nicer than a constantly exposed slider. I do not
> think there's room for showing a standard slider in Rhythmbox, Banshee, or
> Totem. That area should be consumed (at least in RB and Banshee) by metadata,
> etc.
> 
> I don't think this widget is any less usable than a regular slider.


> Comment #14 from Ronald Bultje  (developer, points: 21) 
> 2007-03-08 00:19 UTC [reply]  
> It's actually more usable. B/c of the icon, you get instant information on what
> the button does. Since all (media) apps share it, it's a learn-once-use-always
> thing for users, too.
> 
> A slider is just a slider, like all the million other sliders on GNOME, e.g.
> the brightness slider in gimp, the quality slider in banshee's vorbis encoder,
> etc. I just looked at the f-spot screenshots to see what you're talking about
> and I still haven't been able to figure out which slider in f-spot is supposed
> to be the zoom slider, and I'm a programmer!
> 
> Anyway, this discussion has been had before in the totem bug report, please
> re-read that and let's leave this bug report for the potential inclusion of
> this widget in gtk+.

Well I do think that [1] and [2] do look a lot better and are much more
self explanatory. In particular iTunes' interface delivers the same, if
not more, information and functionality in less area than rhythmbox's. I
think the latter[3] is quite wastefull even if the button volume saves
some horizontal pixels. Don't you agree?

F-spot's zoom widget on the lower right corner is IMO misplaced but the
widget itself is even better than iTunes' due to the color use: longer
blue bar meaning higher volume, zoom, etc. The icons used may not be the
best for the zoom metaphor though.

The ideal widget would look like this[4] IMO.

This is only my opinion and I'm not even contributing a patch so I don't
really get to vote but thanks for considering anyway.

Rui

[1] http://glua.ua.pt/~rmatos/itunes7.png
[2] http://glua.ua.pt/~rmatos/f-spot.png
[3] http://glua.ua.pt/~rmatos/rhythmbox.png
[4] http://glua.ua.pt/~rmatos/ideal-widget.png

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