unity-design team mailing list archive

[Martín Soto <donsoto@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, May 20, 2010 at 11:08 AM, Mark Shuttleworth <mark@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> This strikes me as being too much of a nanny. If music is already
> playing, and someone starts playing something else, that's their choice,
> isn't it?

I guess it depends a lot on the situation. Suppose you´re listening to
music while reading your RSS feeds and, at some point, you see a link
in a blog post that points to an interesting video, or recorded
speech, or any other thing containing sound. It´s reasonable to expect
that you just click on that link without thinking too much of the
potential consequences for your sound setup (this is something we
could call an "impulse click"). The video starts to play on top of
your music and cacophony ensues.

Of course, you can always blame the user--after all, he clicked on the
link, didn´t he--but It´d be a nice touch if the system would handle
this by pausing or otherwise muting the background music while the
video plays. This appears a lot more forgiving and humane to me.

Martín