Re: Planned "Sound Settings" improvements

[David Henningsson <david henningsson canonical com>]

On 10/19/2011 01:42 PM, Bastien Nocera wrote:
> 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.

Ok, I'm not sure what you mean. Could you clarify what should be in such 
a proof-of-concept patch and what could be left out? (Nevertheless, this 
will take at least a few weeks due to the upcoming travel on my own part.)

> Your
> mockup shows 6 outputs, there would probably be at least double that in
> most cases,

A typical laptop would have only two: "Speaker" and "Headphone". (And on 
the input tab, "External Microphone" and "Internal Microphone".) There 
could be a few more - HDMI, SPDIF, USB Headset etc, but I believe more 
than six would be less common.

> 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?).

I'm not completely sure I understand your question, but...

Port/connector selection is implemented as setting a bunch of ALSA mixer 
controls. Changing ports/connectors on the output side does not affect 
the input side (and vice versa).

It is relatively rare for a profile selection on the output side to 
affect the input side, but it can happen, e g on bluetooth headsets 
where a "voice" profile would be full duplex and a "Music" profile would 
be half-duplex (but higher quality).
Maybe a warning is best here? E g if the user switches from "voice" to 
"music", we could have a dialog saying "This will disable bluetooth 
microphone. [OK] [Cancel]". I'm open for suggestions though.

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

No problem. I assume patches should be GPLv2+ (that's what gvc is 
written in today) and submitted against the master branch of 
git://git.gnome.org/gnome-control-center - is this correct?

--
David Henningsson, Canonical Ltd.
http://launchpad.net/~diwic