johnhoran
commented
9 years ago Thanks for the feedback. There is a lot there to get through, but I'll consider them and address any ones I have an opinion on.
- separate mixer from (master volume and input/output switcher) in agregate menu
- show input/output switcher in agregate menu when needed
To address both of these together, my personal preference is for a single menu containing all volume controls. But I do think it might be fairly simple to have both, the sliders could be be placed into the aggregate menu instead of where they are now. So if I get a chance I'll have a look at this. The "when needed" part is dependent on #14
- show mixer icon in panel if there is output from applications, use dropdown icon as other menus
It is used on the aggregate menu, and the app menu, but is missing from the calendar/event menu, so it isn't used everywhere. It also seems a little bit superfluous to me, just by being in the panel generally communicates already that it is a drop-down menu, so the icon doesn't really communicate anything that isn't already obvious. The mixer icon part makes sense if the volume sliders were moved back into the aggregate menu, so I'll consider them together.
- remove unobvious mute and switch to application functionality, just one function to change volume on whole menu - this is mixer after all, not anything else
Honestly the application switch functionality is one of my favorite features. I mean it is probably the part that needs the most work right now. I really want to figure out a more consistent way of linking it to the correct window for an application. Eventually I'd love it if I were able to figure out which tab in a browser window an audio stream belongs to, and switch directly to that, but that is a just a pipe dream at the moment. I do take your point about it not being obvious enough that these things are clickable, Gnome communicates this using backgrounds, but I don't think that would look very nice here. The icon as a mute button is somewhat consistent with the aggregate menu. Where you can click the icons and they will mute the output by virtue of them being to the left of the slider, the don't unmute, but still it isn't completely unexpected that you might click them. But even if they aren't obvious, I don't think they detract from anything.
- don't use application name at all, but what actually plays in format that every application can provide, in this example it's song and author
Kinda part of the previous comment, which is why I addressed that first. But additionally it really is only the media applications that give any more information than the application name. And for those, generally they are going to be using MPRIS. For the vast majority of applications, it is a choice between the application name, or no label.
- buttons are using shell theme and are connected and same size as in GNOME Music
The current icons were chosen though a long process of drawing the first think that came to mind. Making them not look completely crap, and then just going with it. So I will probably look at changing them to something that looks better at some point.
- album name looks like link and opens player on click as well as album art (this is only exception to above)
I'm not a fan of using underlines to indicate clickability. It breaks with the style established everywhere else in Gnome, that tends to use background color. These also aren't always available, e.g. if you are watching a video in VLC, you can still have MPRIS support, and therefore the media controls, but you won't have anything for the album art or name. Therefore I think I should avoid putting any functionality on the album art or name.
Anyway, those are my thoughts on it for the moment.
So this is just a idea of what I consider as perfect GNOME Shell volume mixer. This may not be suitable at all for this extension, but I would like to share this, just in case you will find some of it worthy.
The mixer part will look like this: