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

IMO, we should start by getting rid of the system-wide volume. It adds lots of complexity without providing any significant advantages. A global volume control is useful when you're mixing several channels, but this is not what people will be doing with the default volume controls in Ubuntu. And the problem is that the global control negatively affects even the simplest and most common use cases.

Consider, for instance, someone who is listening to a single sound source, such as a music or video player. I'd say this is, by far, the most common use case we have. Unless you're a sound engineer or some such, this is what you're likely to be doing 99% of the time your sound card is active.

Setting the volume in this case should be absolutely straightforward but it's not in current Ubuntu. You have to deal with two sliders, one usually inside the player (e.g., the button/slider in Rhythmbox's top-right corner) and one in the volume indicator that interact with each other in a funny, unintuitive way. Sliding any of them down, for example, will mute sound, but if you want to reach the maximal volume, you'll have to slide them *both* all the way up. Of course, if you understand that the sliders correspond to two separate volume filters that are connected serially, you'll be able to deal with this system just fine. But most people won't grasp this--or at least, it will be a long time until they do--and they'll be confused and frustrated.

You speak about "all applications". How many applications do you expect to have running and producing sound at a given time? I'd expect a maximum of two, and that only for the relatively unusual cases where people talk on the Internet phone and listen to music or watch videos at the same time.

My guess is that this relative control would be unintuitive for most people. All sound sources they deal with in the real world (TV, stereo, phone, etc.) have absolute volume controls, not relative ones. If you want to talk on the phone and listen to music at the same time (which is rather unusual because most people will turn off the radio, anyway) you just fiddle a bit with both the phone and the radio until it's OK for you. It is not that you turn a big "Room Loudness" knob until you're satisfied, and then adjust the "Radio" and "Phone" relative knobs behind that panel in the wall. A design where you directly control the absolute volume of applications is likely to be a lot more familiar to people.

This doesn't means one couldn't also have one standard application
volume control for each application as a windicator; in this case,
having redundant controls wouldn't hurt - as they support different
use cases (controlling sound in the current application vs setting
global sound preferences).