Re: [Ayatana] Two suggested designs for the Sound Indicator

[Sense Hofstede <qense@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On 3 May 2010 16:19, Tyler Brainerd <tylerbrainerd@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Can we all please completely not consider this odd idea that there is muscle
> memory for something like mousing around your desktop? Any mouse or track
> pad has limited area, and any normal user has plenty of muscle memory
> training them to be accurate using it in any minor or major way. Muscle
> memory should not, at all, be considered when it comes to UI design meant
> for the mouse. It is not muscle memory we should be concerned with, it's
> recognizability and ease of recognition.
>  If I open the sound menu and it's totally random, this is bad, but not
> because I don't have the muscle memory; it's becuase it's hard to recognize
> the things I want
> Tyler
>

Well said, I couldn't agree more with you. Muscle memory shouldn't be
the argument, but ease of recognition and use.

Many people have said that adding all sound using applications is not
useful because they wouldn't use it. A few points:
 * There is nothing that prevents you from ignoring the applications
in the list. In fact, I think we should make it very easy to quickly
access the main volume slider
 * The fact that some people don't use it doesn't mean that all people
don't use it. We've seen in this discussion that a lot of people came
up with uses for it quickly. We shouldn't oversimplify our desktop.
Keeping it clean is important, but it should be easy for people to get
extra tools when they want it. (Not that I think these volume sliders
are power tools.)
 * It is easy to have a central place to control the sound, like Chow
Loong Jin already said. It's no use to go through all tabs and writing
a Firefox plugin doesn't provide much consistency and still isn't
central.

I've put Mark Shuttleworth in the 'To:'-field because of the collision
of this design with the 'windicators'. I really like the idea of
adding those indicators to applications, the future of Ubuntu looks
exiting. However, I'm not sure if it would be best practise to give
each application its own volume slider in the Sound Indicator applet
and as a 'windicator'. Mark, have you followed this discussion so far?
(Link: <http://people.ubuntu.com/~qense/SoundIndicatorMockupTwo.jpg>)
What do you think of this? Would it be duplicate work?
People mentioned the advantage of being able to mute a game -- a
fullscreen application -- easily via the Sound Indicator. The game
couldn't use the 'windicator'. Considering that we wanted all system
information (battery, network, etc) on a central place, wouldn't it be
better to keep sound central as well and provide one way of accessing
the volume sliders? The Sound Indicator would be in the upper left
corner anyway.

Thank you all for you reactions, I feel we've got a nice discussion going here.

Regards,
-- 
Sense Hofstede
[ˈsɛn.sə ˈɦɔf.steː.də]