Re: Planned "Sound Settings" improvements

[Allan Day <allanpday gmail com>]

On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 11:46 AM, David Henningsson
<david henningsson canonical com> wrote:
> Hi!

Hey David!

> 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.)
>
> Btw, should you be interested in discussing this with me personally, you can
> reach me in Prague next week for GStreamer and Linux conferences, and at
> Ubuntu Developer Summit the week after that.
>
> Some additional pointers:
>  *
> http://voices.canonical.com/david.henningsson/2011/09/06/pulseaudio-with-jack-detection/
>  * https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-desktop/2011-October/003344.html
>  * If you were at the desktop summit, this was briefly discussed at Colin's
> talk:
> https://desktopsummit.org/program/sessions/pulseaudio-control-and-command-state-desktop-integration-gnome-kde

Jack support seems like it would be advantageous for the user
experience, so this is really good news. I'm not entirely sure about
some aspects of your mockup though, so it would be good to run through
the UI design in a bit more detail.

Please feel free to use the existing sound panel design page [1]. The
other design pages (eg, [2]) give an idea how we use them. It'd be
great to work together on this!

Best wishes,

Allan

[1] https://live.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings/Sound
[2] https://live.gnome.org/Design/SystemSettings/Power
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