Re: [Usability] Mute in GNOME mixer applet does not have correct behavior

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Sun, 2006-03-19 at 18:30 +0100, Jaap Haitsma wrote:
> Wanting to set the volume to a level so that you do not hear is a
> special case. Just wanting to set volume lower isn't. 

The term for this special case is "mute" not 0. I was not arguing that
simply wanting to lower the volume was a special case. I was arguing
that, in fact, it was not a special case, and therefore should not
continue to be treated as one.

> Any random piece of software. I agree it's maybe not that likely but if
> we can make the mixer applet functioning well in that case, why not do
> that? It was brought up by the gnome-mixer-applet maintainers in
> http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=164925

If a user is using a random piece of software that behaves this way when
they click the "mute" button in that application, then would they not
expect to see the "mute" icon as well in GNOME, as they probably see a
mute icon in their application?

> The bug won't be filed in my case. The user holds down the key until he
> sees the "0" icon and then stops.

Until the user cannot hear the audio and/or the progress meter is at 0.
We should not rely upon an icon as the only method of feedback to the
user. As I said before, the pop-up should have a label and progress bar
which show the volume level more exactly. Another option would be to
have a "beep" sound, like those of other operating systems when the
volume level is changed.

> 0% volume is a special case because together with mute it's the only
> possibility to make your computer completely silent.

This statement clearly says "0% == mute". Given this, the current
behavior of the icon is correct. The issue is that unmute does not
restore to the previous level.

> If there aren't any other people who feel like me that there should be a
> "0" icon to represent, I'm happy to go with your suggested improvement
> that the 0% volume is shown as "low" instead of "muted" as it is now.

I'm sure there are plenty of people who would also argue for the "0"
icon. But that doesn't mean there should be a "0" icon. As you said, we
need to try and make the experience be the best one possible. To do
that, we need to make 0 be either mute or low, but not both. It is not
both. That said we need to do one of the following:

1) Keep 0 as mute, and fix the unmute behavior to restore to something
2) Make 0 be low

And other than the case where a non-GNOME application is setting the
volume on the hardware itself to 0, how many people are really going to
hold down the lower volume key, rather than just pressing mute? Another
thing we need to do, is to make it easy to mute the volume, from the
mixer applet's pop-up. I think it's the main thing that causes people to
drag the volume to 0.


-- dobey