unity-design team mailing list archive

[Chow Loong Jin <hyperair@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Monday 03,May,2010 09:38 PM, Jan-Christoph Borchardt wrote:
> 2010/5/3 Martín Soto <donsoto@xxxxxxxxx>:
>> My problem with your design is that, as far as I can tell, the large
>> majority of people won't want to play more than one sound source at the same
>> time. You are watching a video, or playing some background musing, or
>> chatting with someone, but doing two or more of these at the same time is
>> very rare, because they clearly interfere with each other.
>>
>> So, for example, if you're playing background music and want to watch that
>> video you just got from your pal over IM, you'll probably pause the music.
>> And if someone calls you over Skype when you're watching the video, you'll
>> pause it before taking the call. Given that this is the case, a single
>> volume slider should suffice. The only "normal" situation I can think about
>> where it makes sense to have sound mixed or superimposed is when
>> notification sounds ("you have new mail") play on top of other sources. For
>> this case, the volume of notifications should be made so that they're
>> audible over the sound that is currently playing, which is something that
>> probably can be achieved automatically anyway.
> 
> Thanks for writing out my post in full:

> On 3 May 2010 12:04, Jan-Christoph Borchardt <jan@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> Absolutely. By default there should be only one volume slider for all
>> programs (like now). A control for every program (e. g. gedit …) will
>> just confuse users.
>>
>> I am sceptic on how the use cases are anyway: When you are listening
>> to music, you normally do not watch a movie at the same time. If
>> certain notifications are masked by loud music, there should be a
>> function to automatically slightly dim every other sound when a
>> notification is playing (in a subtle, not in an annoying way, of
>> course).
> 
> +
> 
> On 3 May 2010 13:14, Chow Loong Jin <hyperair@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> On Monday 03,May,2010 06:54 PM, Jan-Christoph Borchardt wrote:
>>> I know. I could have said Firefox as well. ;)
>>
>> Firefox is more likely to appear on the list, and would be especially useful,
>> since Firefox doesn't have volume controls of its own.
> 
> What would be the use case for Firefox sound controls? It would only
> add another control to the already present main sound slider and the
> many more sliders from various video and audio sites (Youtube, Last.fm
> etc.).

Think of all those flashy annoying myspace pages that play music and don't
provide any controls. Do you honestly believe that all the video and audio
players out there embedded into web pages have volume controls?

And what about all those Facebook games out there that have annoying background
music that cannot be muted? I think Firefox is a great candidate to have a sound
control of its own in the sound indicator, similar to the way it's currently
done in Sound Preferences.

There is a further thread somewhere down the line about how annoying it is to
have to switch to the appropriate application and turn off sound for a call. Now
imagine how much more annoying it would be to look through ~30 different tabs to
figure out which webpage is making sound and disable it.

-- 
Kind regards,
Chow Loong Jin

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