Re: [Usability] Fwd: New Sound Preferences and Volume Control

["Philip Ganchev" <phil ganchev gmail com>]

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 11:46 AM, Pedro Maurício Costa
<pmauricio costa gmail com> wrote:
> Diego, that's exactly what I'm talking about: for you it doesn't make
> sense that a movie sound is interrupted by an incoming e-mail alert,
> so why should it, right? A movie/music is ranked higher than e-mail
> alerts or IM invitations for you. What if it was someone calling you,
> maybe you would like to see it right away. It's something hard to
> manage I guess, specially if you don't want to come up with a super
> hard way to configure this "sound prioritization".

Again - yes, you may want per-app settings but that is not enough
reason to put a per-app volume control in a prominent place like the
title bar. That is only warranted if you *change* your per-app
settings very often, as often as you would close or minimize windows.
But that does not happen. So there is no good reason for putting a
volume control in the title bar or in the window menu.

On Wed, Dec 3, 2008 at 11:57 AM, Diego Moya <turingt gmail com> wrote:
> In that case, a per application micro-management as proposed in this
> discusion is too cumbersome.
>
> A viable implementation for this "priorities" concept would be to provide a
> list of priorized categories (pre-populated with categories for the most
> common usage cases), allowing the association of each application to one of
> the categories.

A much better solution. Maybe this system should be integrated in the
notification mechanism, since most of the apps that we are talking
about emit their sounds for notifications. For example, IM message,
lost network connection, email, system error, running on battery,
battery low, etc.

> - Several priorization profiles could be saved,
> - changing between one scenario could be done instantly by loading a
> different created profile,
> - and creating a new scenario would consist of reordering the categories.

I think that would be unnecessary and the UI too complex. Just provide
a list and let the user re-order the priorities.