GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 657335
Unnecessary and unexplained tickybox for “Echo Cancellation” in Preferences
Last modified: 2011-09-08 12:22:46 UTC
I ran Empathy master today, and discovered a new tab in Preferences: / General / Notifications / Sounds / Calls \ Location \ … \ +---------------------------------/ \-------------+ | | | Audio | | [x] Echo Cancellation | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | +---------------------------------------------------------+ So … why would I want to disable echo cancellation? (Because it's immature?) And why might an ordinary person understand what “echo cancellation” is, and the circumstances under which they might want to disable it? Also, I wish I were exaggerating the amount of empty space, but I'm actually understating it: the window's half as wide again. We should at least add a [Start Akonadi] button to fill the gap.
Okay, when I enabled Call support the tab got a bit less lonely: http://willthompson.co.uk/misc/Preferences-Calls.png I guess the “Audio” label is there because in future there will be a Video label. The “Input volume” and “Input level” labels should have colons, or the labels in the “Themes” tab should not have colons. Looking around other GNOME applications, the former seems correct. The slider feels really long, just as the window feels a bit overly wide. This is a side-effect of the number of tabs, of course.
I added colons to the labels, and while I was there removed some unnecessary clutter in the Themes tab. http://cgit.collabora.com/git/user/wjt/empathy.git/log/?h=657335-Preferences-Calls-Tab I tried to make the “Input volume:” label line up with the slider (rather than the middle of the GtkScale widget) but it doesn't really seem that easy to make it look good without just guessing random yalign values. I still don't like the tickybox for echo cancellation being there at all. If it has to stay, perhaps someone could write an explanation of what it means and why one might want to untick it?
++ Sjoerd should know the details, but I think echo cancellation can introduce issues with some devices or something.
I've added one more commit that rewords the tickybox and tries to explain what it does and why one might ever consider disabling it. http://willthompson.co.uk/misc/echo.png Of course, this branch changes strings—so if we want to merge it for 3.2 we'll apparently have to send a notification mail.
I tweaked the wording, at Arun Raghavan’s suggestion: Echo cancellation helps to make your voice sound clearer to the other person, but may cause problems on some computers. If you or the other person hear strange noises or glitches during calls, try turning echo cancellation off and restarting the call. Is this enabled by default?
(In reply to comment #5) > I tweaked the wording, at Arun Raghavan’s suggestion: > > Echo cancellation helps to make your voice sound clearer to the other > person, but may cause problems on some computers. If you or the other > person hear strange noises or glitches during calls, try turning echo > cancellation off and restarting the call. > > Is this enabled by default? Yes. Looks good, I'll ask for an exception.
Approved; go go merge !
(In reply to comment #7) > Approved; go go merge ! Consider it done!