bluetooth applet ui unfit for use

[Wolfgang Fahl]

Binary package hint: bluez-gnome

The bluetooth applet version 1.8 has two menus
a left-click menu with the entry "Setup new device"
a right-click menu with the entries "Preferences", "Setup new device", "Send files to device", "Browse files on device" and "About".

The preferences dialog then offers a tab "general" and a tab for the current computer's device, with a list
of known devices. There are for icons offered in this dialog a "+" a connect icon, a star icon and a circle with slash icon.

These are the bugs in this ui:
- The icons are not explained. When you hover over the buttons no tooltip is displayed
- the "Setup new device" option is redundant.
- the most needed function of checking the status and connnection of devices is many clicks away

some of the improvements should be:
- show the list of connected and available know devices immediately on left click
- when discovering devices with "setup new device" known devices should also be displayed - it's confusing to not
see them if you didn't remember that they are known.

The whole UI needs to be more user centric - there needs to be a feedback option in the about dialog to allow for suggestions to improve the whole thing.

There needs to be a link to the source code that the community can work with this applet. There are currently only two developers and the complaints about the undocumented symbols have not been taken care of for more than 1 1/2 years - obviously the open source idea does not work to well here ...

Hope some of the issues can be fixed by discussing this bug report.

[Baptiste Mille-Mathias (bmillemathias)]

bluez-gnome is no more supported, now you should prefer gnome-bluetooth which has fixed a lot of theses issues.

[rduke15 (rduke15)]

Well, the result of removing bluez-gnome and installing gnome-bluetooth had the result of removing the BT icon in the panel, with no apparent replacement anywhere in the menus. This was on a Jaunty system.

After some digging, I saw that the package gnome-bluetooth (0.11.0-0ubuntu4) actually lists bluez-gnome as recommended in it's dependencies. So it' doesn't look like it replaces it.

And the file /usr/share/doc/gnome-bluetooth/README says "This package contains [..] a simple GUI to explore which devices are
available (gnome-bluetooth-manager)" but it doesn't:

  $ gnome-bluetooth-manager
  bash: gnome-bluetooth-manager: command not found

[Baptiste Mille-Mathias (bmillemathias)]

Ah sorry I thought you were using karmic ... :-/

[Baptiste Mille-Mathias (bmillemathias)]

I WONTFIX this bug as bluez-gnome is obsolete now starting in karmic and no more development will be made on it.