unity-design team mailing list archive

["frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx" <frederik.nnaji@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 15:04, Walter Wittel <wittelw@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> An alternative to a mute button might be to sample the ambient sound level
> using the mic (should work for most laptops, less so for desktops, but they
> likely have volume set for location already) and adjust volume
> appropriately.
>

haaah yeah ambient intelligence ;)
http://ambient.media.mit.edu/people/pranav/current/sparsh.html

these guys had that name, but went for "fluid interfaces" after a while.
A startup sound should be an audible notification that the system is now
loaded and ready to be used. Any sound that doesn't convey this information
would be a nuisance and of course we would then need to have ambient
intelligence, mute buttons in the login screen and so on and so forth..

The only way i see to really tackle this is to offer a silent boot in grub,
for those who don't like to hear the startup sound, and to design a
semantically useful startup sound in the first place, so hearing the start
sound can finally make sense for the first time, no matter what taste in
music you have.