unity-design team mailing list archive

[Frederik Nnaji <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2010 at 09:35, Matthew Paul Thomas <mpt@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:

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> Diego Moya wrote on 08/05/10 00:20:
> >...
> > On 7 May 2010 15:58, Matthew Paul Thomas wrote:
> >>
> >> About the title of the menu, Diego Moya wrote on 04/05/10 20:20:
> >>>>> And one feature I miss is having a volume slider always shown in
> >> This is perhaps one case where global improvement (everything acting
> >> like a menu) has had a local drawback (a volume slider can no longer
> >> appear directly in the panel).
>

What GlobalMenu does, is to detect what the user is currently looking at,
then afford the respective controls for its manipulation.
The Sound Menu can also behave like this:
* Probe for focused media apps
* assign the most accessible volume fader to the currently focused media
app's output signal
* volume manipulation without media app window focused affects global
volume.


> > I like somebody's proposal of being able to drag the closed panel icon
> > left and right to change the slide without needing to open the menu
> > first. This way I would almost recover the previous functionality,
> > although it would work now only for power users like me.
>

i could imagine vertical dragging for volume / mute, that would mean a max
of perhaps 1 button would fit into this menu beneath the slider.
Then we would need an extra Indicator Menu for Media Apps, or something
similar for gstreamer-type media in general.
Perhaps not all too stupid either, to build a content-aware transport
control UI for Gstreamer..
Imagine looking at /listening to content, no need to open a player, the
screen is your player and the controls are part of the OS, attached to the
panel but detachable to function like a real transparent OSD.
Only thing you would need something like Rhythmbox for would be the music
library.
Moving from hierarchical filesystem to the new Places concept with Tracker
and Zeitgeist on our side, all we'll need is an ID3v2 tagreader for Nautilus
and a play/pause button.
The rest of Rhythmbox is then superfluent.
This would help a lot, since people often have a hard time finding the right
player for the right content.


> That would still make it inconsistent with all the other menus.
>

Even if "volume vs mute" was the only thing this menu did?


> >> It is awkward that we have separate system and application-specific
> >> volume settings, but I don't see how getting rid of the system volume
> >> setting would work.
>

it's an improvement, clearly, that a player can remember the last state of
volume it was set to. This way, Main Volume doesn't have to be tampered with
and the per application settings are never lost.


> > Uh? I didn't suggest getting rid of the system volume, I suggested
> > having volume sliders in individual tabs synchronized with the global
> > system volume and change it (just like the sound preferences slider
> > does, and the Totem slider does not).
>

ADD METERS!
Digital audio hardware often uses so called LED Meterbridges for this kind
of purpose.. That's what we need first, IMO: sound, visually represented.

Sorry I misunderstood you, but I still don't understand you. What tabs
> are you referring to?


I think he meant horizontal slots in the "Applications" tab of the Sound
Preferences dialog.