GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 689635
icons for output devices aren't very nice
Last modified: 2015-04-01 14:24:07 UTC
We're using icons that look like old fashioned PC internal hardware to represent built-in sound output devices. This isn't a good metaphor and doesn't look very nice. Are we trying to differentiate output device classes? What are the possibilities? As it stands I think we are better off with no icons here. If the icons can be made useful and aren't overly repetitious then we can use symbolic icons.
There are in fact other icons too - if you plug in a USB or bluetooth headset, you'll hopefully have a headset icon for that one instead of the PCI card icon. But I do agree that at least the internal one should change to represent what is on the first line, so that we get icons looking like Headphones, Speakers, Mics etc. This should be done as a property of the port; we have implemented port properties in PulseAudio, but we don't fill them with content yet. The icon is being looked up somehow from a string, that could e g be "audio-card-pci" for the current PCI card icon, or "audio-headset-usb" for an USB Headset. Before I try to do that, do you know what icons/string list I can choose from currently?
I had one more look. The icons currently suggested by PulseAudio are these (see src/pulsecore/sink.c, pa_device_init_icon) t = "audio-input-microphone"; t = "camera-web"; t = "computer"; t = "phone"; t = "multimedia-player"; t = "video-display"; t = "modem"; t = "audio-card"; t = "audio-headset"; t = "audio-headphones"; t = "audio-speakers"; t = "audio-handsfree"; The first group are all part of the XDG icon spec and shouldn't be any problem. For the second group, it seems like Lennart a few years ago tried to get more icons into the spec, but failed: http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/xdg/2009-May/010397.html Trying to figure out if we have these icons yields the following result (on my Ubuntu system) : audio-headset: Shipped by both gnome-control-center and oxygen-icon-theme (KDE). audio-headphones: Shipped by oxygen-icon-theme (KDE) only. audio-speakers: Shipped by gnome-icon-theme only. audio-handsfree: Not shipped by any package. While I could go ahead and add these as port properties in PulseAudio, and then try to use this in g-c-c, could you check on your side if you can have somebody making sure that you ship these icons in the same package/tarball/repository? That way we could avoid temporary breakage.
Keep in mind that if the "audio-foo" icon look up fails, I believe the icon spec dictates it should fallback to a generic "audio" icon (i.e. split on "-" and lop off the last bit). So provided there is at very least an "audio" icon shipped somewhere, it should be fairly safe to use these icon names IMO. (I hope I'm correct with the above :D)
(In reply to comment #3) > Keep in mind that if the "audio-foo" icon look up fails, I believe the icon > spec dictates it should fallback to a generic "audio" icon (i.e. split on "-" > and lop off the last bit). > > So provided there is at very least an "audio" icon shipped somewhere, it should > be fairly safe to use these icon names IMO. You are right about the fallback mechanism in place, but indeed we lack the generic audio icon right now. I'll see about adding all the missing bits to both gnome-icon-theme and gnome-icon-theme-symbolic.
Just while on the topic of icons, it would be kinda nice if the icon used on the OSD when adjusting volume matched up too. e.g. if I had headphones plugged in it would be good if it used the headphones icon. That's obviously harder to do due to the volume-level-specific icon, but IIRC it was originally based on the icon naming spec too (where each decade of volume had it's own icon) but perhaps this has been changed in more recent versions? Perhaps it's just a matter of creating a whole bunch of them for all the permutations if that scheme is still in place? Figured I'd mention it while on the topic :)
Ok, I made a trivial patch for the pulseaudio side. Let's see if it makes it into 3.0 or if it will be deferred to 4.0.
We don't show "hardware devices" in the list anymore. So you either get a speaker, headset/headphones or a TV to represent HDMI. (In reply to Colin Guthrie from comment #5) > Just while on the topic of icons, it would be kinda nice if the icon used on > the OSD when adjusting volume matched up too. e.g. if I had headphones > plugged in it would be good if it used the headphones icon. We show the name of the output in the popup. File a bug against gnome-settings-daemon if you think we should change that.