Re: Planned "Sound Settings" improvements

[Bastien Nocera <hadess hadess net>]

On Wed, 2011-10-19 at 12:46 +0200, David Henningsson wrote:
> Hi!
> 
> Over the coming months, I'm planning to make some improvements to the 
> "Sound Settings" dialog. While my primary target is the upcoming Ubuntu 
> 12.04 release, I believe it will be of mutual benefit if this 
> functionality also becomes part of GNOME.
> 
> To give you some background, I've been working on PulseAudio patches for 
> jack detection the last few months. Upstreaming of these patches are in 
> progress and will be a part of PulseAudio 2.0. These patches also make 
> PulseAudio expose more information, that makes it possible for us to 
> make the Sound Settings UI more user friendly.
> 
> The main point of the redesign is to remove the hardware tab, and have 
> input and output tabs incorporate the information currently on the 
> hardware tab. There should be one row for every combination of 
> Port/Connector and Card, rather than today's practice of one row for 
> every card and a combobox for "Connector". The point is that since the 
> average user would think of "Headphones" and "Speakers" rather than 
> "Internal Audio Analog Stereo", we should present 
> Headphones/Speakers/etc to the user as the first thing he/she sees.
> 
> There is a small mockup here:
> http://people.canonical.com/~diwic/sound-settings/gvc_ui_final.jpg
> The two bottom checkboxes will likely be removed. You should see it more 
> as "what" will be on the picture rather than "where".
> 
> While GNOME might not want to have this feature before PulseAudio 2.0 is 
> released, I figured it'd be better to be too early to keep you in the 
> loop, than too late. So I'm reaching out to hear, well first and 
> foremost if this is something you're interested in, and if so, what help 
> is available when it comes to things such as making upstreaming to GNOME 
> go as smooth as possible. While I believe I can write most of the code, 
> I'm not used to the GNOME release cycle and workflow.
> 
> As for getting the pixels right, I'm not a visual designer myself, but I 
> can probably get some help with that from within Canonical. (Also, 
> moving something two pixels down or rephrase a string, is of course 
> something you can change quite easy, should it not suit your preferences.)

I'm fine with the idea, but I want to make sure that a couple of things
are clear:
- I'd like to see a proof-of-concept patch as soon as possible. Your
mockup shows 6 outputs, there would probably be at least double that in
most cases, and it's not clear to me how you will show the interaction
between port/connector card for output/input (eg. if I select SPDIF
output, can I select analog input for that particular card?).

- Patches should go in bugzilla as soon as possible. I really don't want
to see a code drop.

Cheers