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

[Jaap Haitsma <jaap haitsma org>]

On Thu, 2006-03-23 at 16:26 -0500, Rodney Dawes wrote:
> 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.

Knowing what the volume will be when you unmute is a complete different
problem than the issue why I started this thread (I.e. if volume is zero
the mute icon is shown and if you unmute nothing seems to change)

So to solve the original problem with the icons we currently have we
should do the following IMHO


state		icon

mute		mute
vol==0		mute
0<vol<=1/3	min
1/3<vol<2/3	med
2/3<vol<1	max

1. When volume == 0  we put the state to mute (i.e. the mute menu item
will be checked). If unmute is pressed in that state we put the volume
at 3% (3% is the step size used by the keyboard shortcut)

2. If volume is changed in mute state the audio is unmuted

Do we all agree on this??

Jaap