GUI enhancements

[monreal]

Today I gave pulse a try and while I like the system overall, I don't like how the GUI tools are presented. I have done a mockup for the pavucontrol application but the others often have the same problems.

[monreal]

Screenshot

[monreal]

The screenshot above shows pavucontrol with four parts marked:

A: Header. Why do PA apps have such a header? It takes away a lot of space for no good reason. Also, GNOME apps don't have such a thing, so the PA apps look out of place.

B: Lock button. I see why you choose this icon, it's a lock in stock GTK. But in GNOME-icon-theme and other themes another metaphor is used, so you cannot rely on a given metaphor. It's a bad idea to rely on an icon with a totally different meaning (in this case: security/authentication) anyway. No big deal, have a look at what GIMP does for locking two sliders together (crop or scale dialogs for example). IMHO a widget like this would work well in PA as well.

C: Mute button. The icon used is a status icon. IMHO having a button with a pressed state for active (with the unmuted icon) and unpressed state for inactive (with muted icon) would be more usable.

D: Footer. Right now you can only close the app using the window manager's [x] as there is no menu. IMHO a footer with a [Close] button would make sense here. It would also allow you to add a [Help] button, which could be useful in such an application.

For all these, see the following mockup.

[monreal]

Mockup

[lennart]

The SVN version of pavucontrol doesn't have the white bar anymore.

And please be aware that I have lots of ideas for the pavucontrol UI and I quite frankly know that it sucks big time right now. However, I am certainly not going to fix this, since I don't like hacking UIs. May land is infrastructure, not UI. Hence I will do only the basic minimum to make things work as needed, but polishing UIs: no. That has to come from someone else.