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

[Rodney Dawes <dobey novell com>]

On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 21:18 +0100, Jaap Haitsma wrote:
> On Mon, 2006-03-20 at 17:11 -0600, Shaun McCance wrote:
> > Since mute is an orthogonal operation to the volume setting,
> > perhaps the muted icon should continue to show the actual
> > volume setting.  So if you mute at 80%, you'd see the icon
> > maybe grayed out a bit with a red X over it, but still with
> > the three lines.  You can actually still change the volume
> > while muted.
> > 
> > It might serve as a nice indication that unmuting may blast
> > your ear drums out of your skull.  Just a thought.
> > 
> 
> I really like this suggestion, blasting music/sound out of your PC is
> sometimes really annoying in public. 

This is why people use mute and/or headphones in the first place.

> Rodney, do you think these icons: "min-mute, med-mute, max-mute" can be
> added to the icon spec?

I would rather not. It's a lot of duplication of icons for very little,
if any, gain. We need to actually solve the problem, not sweep it under
the carpet, by trying to have more pretty icons to look at instead. If
the user changes the volume while mute is enabled, the behavior should
be to unmute and change the volume, I think. This is what Mac OS does.
In fact, OS X seems to have behavior very close to that of the current
situation in the applet. Dragging the volume to 0 in OS X is muting, and
toggling the mute from there, sets the volume to something like 1% or
3%, and toggling again, mutes. On Windows, the icons for 0% and 1% are
the same.

We should pick one of these two behaviors and do the same thing, I
think.

-- dobey