Re: [Usability] Fwd: New Sound Preferences and Volume Control

[Andy Owen <andy-gnome-usability ultra-premium com>]

On Thu, 2008-12-04 at 12:41 -0500, Mackenzie Morgan wrote:
> On Thu, 2008-12-04 at 17:37 +0100, Diego Moya wrote:
> > And this is how it would be used in applications that require direct
> > sound input, like the media player:
> > http://www.imagebam.com/image/920a1620009224
> 
> So is this being suggested as a feature of Metacity, then?  Because like
> I said, for people that use GNOME with other WM (Compiz is very common),
> I don't think it'd translate.  I know it wouldn't translate for
> GNOME/Xmonad combination.
> 

metacity is part of GNOME, xmonad isn't:

http://live.gnome.org/TwoPointTwentythree/Desktop

But, what I've been proposing has always included an api so applications
can see if their window manager is handling the volume control stuff.
You would have something like this:

Default (the state of all applications now): Application has its own
volume setting (which rarely uses pulse-audio, and hence is lagged and
close to unusable), but also has a volume icon on title bar when it
plays sounds.

Fixed (what needs to happen to each application): Application calls some
api to find out if it needs to have its own volume setting interface,
and if not (i.e., if running in the new metacity with pulseaudio),
specifies what sort of volume control it needs (more thought needed
here, but to handle the case where a single application has multiple
streams).

Yes it is good not to break stuff for other combinations of software
unnecessarily, but it is bad to let that limit what you do, just to
please the people who have deliberately strayed from the defaults for
something that works better for them.

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