VV GUI

[Mark Doliner]

On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 2:43 PM, Maiku <cmaiku at gmail.com> wrote:
> For a while now the voice and video GUI has settled to the point where
> it's functional, but I'm not very satisfied with it yet. Here's the
> current GUI:
>
> http://www.mrprogrammer.net/vv-now.png
>
> The biggest problem I have with it is that it's using a GtkPaned
> between the backlog and the audio/video so it can't be automatically
> resized. I've tried a few times to make it so that it will auto-size,
> but it doesn't work the way I'd like it to. Ideally, I'd like the
> video to remain a specific ratio (4/3 or possibly later the ratio of
> the video rather than a constant). As the window is vertically resized
> I want the video to expand horizontally to remain within this ratio.
> As the window is horizontally resized I want the backlog to
> grow/shrink to take up the extra space that the video doesn't use.
> I've tried the GtkAspectFrame, but it just pads the extra space rather
> than letting the backlog take it. So unless there's some extra switch
> I'm unaware of, I'm not sure how to accomplish that.
>
> Another issue that's been brought up is that the buttons at the bottom
> move the input box. It has been suggested to move the buttons to be
> under the video as a toolbar. I was wondering if this might also work
> as a vertical button box, to the right of the input box. Maybe
> something like this:
>
> http://www.mrprogrammer.net/vv-option.png
>
> I'm curious to hear input on these points and on the GUI overall.
> Another idea to throw around would be how to handle the GUI for
> multi-user voice and video conferences.

Putting the "Calling..." text and hangup and mute buttons underneath
the videos is awesome.  It creates a tighter association between them.

I haven't actually played around with it, but I don't think it's
necessary to automatically resize the video when the IM window is
resized.  If it's a lot of work to code it to work nicely then I think
it's fine to just require that the user resize it manually.  If you
really want to do it, GtkAspectFrame sounds promising, maybe it's
worth trying again?  If something wasn't expanding to fill it's
parent, maybe a FALSE should be changed to TRUE somewhere (like in a
call to gtk_box_pack_end for example).

-Mark