14 DAY TRIAL // elementary OS founder and developer Daniel Foré reports today, January 4, 2017, on the upcoming availability of a revamped, native Bluetooth settings pane that'll land as a drop-in replacement for GNOME Control Center's one in the Ubuntu-based distro.
elementary OS always innovates itself and offers its users all brand-new technologies and a beautiful graphical user interface for various tools. Lately, it would appear that the development team has been working on redesigning the Bluetooth settings pane that can be accessed through the built-in Control Panel inherited from the GNOME Stack. After more than 20 revisions, the new Bluetooth settings pane looks pretty sleek.
"When you connect a new device, you need to make sure that the adapter is 'visible' so that other devices can find it. This can make pairing frustrating, since it may not be entirely clear that the adapter is not visible even though it’s powered on. We decided to follow how mobile devices handle this, automatically enabling visibility while this pane is open and disabling it when the pane is closed," said Daniel Foré.
elementary OS' new Bluetooth settings pane explained
As you can see from the screenshot gallery attached below, which shows both the current and the upcoming Bluetooth settings pane, the transformation is quite astonishing, and users will now be able to do a lot more when connecting a device, such as to adjust the pointer speed of a mouse or change the balance of a soundbar. Labeled buttons for connecting and disconnecting devices replace the old switches.
The new look of the Bluetooth settings pane also helps color blind users differentiating between "connected" and "not connected" states of the listed devices by implementing status labels to the connected device, similar to the ones of the network settings. Some testing still needs to be done for this to land in elementary OS Loki, but it won't be long now and you'll soon enjoy a much enhanced out-of-the-box Bluetooth experience.
