Our new volume feature

The feature was some time in coming, but Jon bit the bullet, and created the new gnome-volume-control. I came in afterwards, and did bug fixing and small new features.

Compared to the old volume control, we're already winning in terms of ease of use: no more weirdly named ALSA mixers we need to work-around, easy selection of input and output devices, microphone level bar.

Even the applet (as well as the gnome-settings-daemon media keys plugin) is now simpler because it doesn't need to work-around weird sound cards, with weirdly named channels.

PulseAudio 0.9.15 brings a few new features that we'll be able to use in the near future, such as back/front fade, sound card profiles selection (one click to setup multi-speaker output), and probably even Bluetooth headsets integration. Speaker testing is also on the cards.

I haz 5.1!

Yay for the desktop with a modern sound system.

Contributing translations

In a comment to my last post, somebody mentioned that the translations would be better on Launchpad than in GNOME. Adi Roiban posted two articles on his blog showing how to contribute to GNOME translations:
Enjoy collabaration in GNOME translations and Contribute to GNOME as a translator

I'm pretty sure I'll leave the GNOME translations as a feature in that list :)