GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 98355
Mixer menu should behave more like a "normal" menu
Last modified: 2004-12-22 21:47:04 UTC
This is for Volume Control 2.0.1 (Red Hat 8.0 default install). It should act like a "normal" menu. This implies two changes: 1. When I click on it, I currently get a 3-d "push-in" effect. This doesn't match my theme (e.g. Bluecurve, though this is true for most other themes as well) -- it doesn't look like a highlighted menu item, it looks like a button. I'd prefer it to look like a menu, as that's what I envision it as being (similar to the Mac OS X sound control). 2. It should follow Fitz' Law. I have a menu panel across the top of my screen, with the mixer applet next to the clock applet. If I place my mouse over the mixer "menu", move the mouse to the top screen edge, and click, I'll *miss* the applet button. This is different from all the other menus in the menu panel, where I can't "miss" them. Thanks, - Jon
I completely agree. There's no benefit of being a toggle button, since it will never maintain the pushed state, this is, it is only pushed while you use the applet, then it goes no normal state. The togglebutton will be useful if it implies to show/hide the volume control, but this seems better acomplished with a launcher and the tasklist. A flat button style (with Fitz' law too) will be great.
FWIW, the Fitz' law part of this bug is fixed - you can activate the menu by flushing the mouse pointer to the screen edge and clicking.
Also, it's Fitt's law and not Fitz ;)
GNOME 2.10 will feature a new mixer applet. If this bug is still relevant please reopen it after testing out the new mixer applet. Thanks.
Yes, it's still relevant : the clicked applet still looks like a button, and not like a menu.
Created attachment 31782 [details] mockup So you're thinking the mixer applet should look something like this when clicked? (shown next to the menu applet for good measure).
Yes, that's *exactly* what I'm thinking.
Ronald, what do you think?
I kinda like it. The current applet code has a very clear distinction between being shown or hidden (the "menu", that is) so the blue background should be easy to add. I don't know how to do that from the top of my head (I'm not good at Gtk color styles), but it should be easily doable. So I definately agree with (1). As for (2), I'm not sure if that's really an issue. You're basically saying that we should have the popdown menu from the applet always be as large as or smaller than the icon so that, if you go up with your mouse (assuming that the paplet is on a top-panel), you end up on the icon. I'm not sure how important that really is. I guess I can try. As for both, I'm not saying I'll do it tomorrow, but I can try thinking of how to do it and code it one day. I have half a year before GNOME-2.10 comes out. ;).
Actually I thought the request (2) was to make the applet itself follow Fitt's law, i.e. make the "volume" button expand vertically on the panel, so you could activate it with the mouse pointer flushed to the screen edge. This request was against an older version of the applet, and has been correctly implemented for quite some time. So I'm pretty sure you can ignore (2) (correct me if I'm wrong ;-)) Concerning (1), there is a similar bug opened for the window selector applet (bug 111026).
As the original submitter, I can concur: (2) has been solved (at least it works in Gnome 2.6 as seen in Fedora Core 2). As for (1), I would suggest looking at the Menu Panel code (or whatever the Applications and Actions menu items are part of). Just use the same basic idea -- a menu -- but use a pixmap as the menu item instead of text. I'm not sure how feasible this is, but this is what I'm thinking of.
Gtk+ actually has code for all this. I simply had to call gtk_widget_set_state() with GTK_STATE_SELECTED/NORMAL on the applet object and that made it work. Screenshot: http://ronald.bitfreak.net/images/g-v-a.png I think that makes this bug fixed.
I just tried this, it is perfect. Ronald, could you check if you could perform the same magic for bug 111026 ? pretty please ?