unity-design team mailing list archive

[Frederik Nnaji <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

Thanks a lot for your response, SABDFL ;)

On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 14:21, Mark Shuttleworth <
mark.shuttleworth@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> For example, you get a skype call, skype is focused, and you now want to
> lower the volume on the youtube video that was playing when the call
> came in.
>

The answer to this is a high level solution:
We need a priority mode for A/V communication.

Telepathy and Skype need access to a system-wide "Call Priority Mode" to be
able to afford a usable A/V experience.

Call Priority Mode active
* notify me about calls intrusively (hell, it's a phone call !!!)
  - use the notification bubbles
  - show an animated "incoming call" banner in Contact List
* interrupt my workflow to notify about incoming calls
  - mute what you can't pause (live streams)
  - kill what you can't pause/mute (not sure about this one..)
* pause all audio automagically during call / dialing
* mute what you can't pause (live streams)
* give the VoIP client realtime priority for audio and video.
* also pause/mute video in case of a video-enabled call

Call Priority Mode inactive
* show "missed call" information in the responsible indicator menu
* suppress all other call notification, except for a silent banner [1] in
"Contact List"

It is not far fetched to associate the Call Priority Mode with my presence
settings (available vs busy) in the MeMenu.

Or you have music playing, and someone sends you a youtube link, and you
> want to lower the volume of the song playing on in the background.
>

This problem is somehow a question of policy as i understand it:
Do we want seperate indicators for volume in general and players
specifically, or will everything fit better into one menu?

The current solutions are to open Sound Menu, click "Preferences", go to
"Applications" tab and regulate volumes there. Actually, this is more work
than dealing with it in the player's main window directly.

Solutions:
a) interact via "Peak Meter" [2] Windicators in Window Picker ( SUPER+W )
view
  - drag Windicator to control volume, drag-to-beginning-of-fader to mute
b) Seperate Indicator menus for global stuff and focus-specific stuff:

Sound Player Menu (aka sound menu)
* focus specific
  - show controls for the last focused active audio app
  - show respective player icon as rhythmbox appindicator does it
  - show transport controls (seek, previous, next, play/pause)
  - show volume fader with integrated peak meter

Volume Menu - structure (top to bottom)
* global:
  - mute
  - seperator
  - vertical fader for main system volume (drag-to-bottom-of-fader to mute)

> Digital audio hardware often uses so called LED Meterbridges for this
> > kind of purpose.. That's what we need first, IMO: sound, visually
> > represented.
>
> Yes, we could do this, with a custom slider, and it's not a bad idea for
> 2.0.
>

ok ;)
So you are saying that a custom slider would have to be designed for this?
Audacity already has code that displays a meter (see attached screenshot)
Could that code help accellerate anything here?

P.S.:
I like the pulse feature currently hidden in preferences.. not quite
discoverable, but good:
Sound Menu > Preferences > Applications
The problem with this menu is, that it is labelled a preference, while it is
a highly dynamic menu which aggregates information about running
applications and should afford itself more superficially than it currently
does. Perhaps adding it to the Volume Menu as an expandable submenu could
help!? Sound Preferences should stay in System > Preferences.


[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NotificationDesignGuidelines § "Normal Window"
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_meter

Attachment: Screenshot.png
Description: PNG image