221–230 of 490 posts
I think the worst volume control is on Mac OS Big Sur... the missing Volume Icon In Menu Bar. A second close is the volume controls on the MacBook Pro touch bar. Fairly subpar (push-and-hold).
And the Touch Bar volume controls are probably the nicest UX on a Touch Bar, since it allows to change the volume quite fast with a simple drag & slide.
One of my ‘favorites’ is Tesla’s model 3 volume control. One simple physical roller, what could go wrong? Well, if you’re trying to turn down some music to hear a navigation prompt, it actually turns down the navigation volume instead. One can actually turn the navigation volume completely off without realizing it, and now not only is your music still loud, you’ll probably miss your next turn as well.
As always, there's an XKCD[6] for that. Albeit for the phone, but same idea. Would be nice if the side buttons controlled ringer volume only when the phone is either locked or on the home screen. If I'm in an app of any sort, chances are the volume I want to adjust is the media, not the ringer! [6] https://xkcd.com/1884/
Clippy may be a joke, but my phone actually does this (and yours likely does too). In principle, if my headphone volume was actually loud enough to damage my hearing, I'd like to be told about it, but a given reality is the volume setting doesn't produce the same loudness with different headphones, which usually results in an inconvenience when my headphones aren't actually very loud.
It was quite annoying to randomly get your volume cut in half because iOS decided that you'd had enough. Luckily these days you can reclassify Bluetooth devices, so I made this speaker to be recognised as a speaker, which stops it.
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As always, there's an XKCD[6] for that. Albeit for the phone, but same idea. Would be nice if the side buttons controlled ringer volume only when the phone is either locked or on the home screen. If I'm in an app of any sort, chances are the volume I want to adjust is the media, not the ringer! [6] https://xkcd.com/1884/
On iOS I’ve configured the buttons to always change media sound, not the ringer because of this.
Thanks. I just did the same. Not sure why I didn't see that before.
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I'm going to pre-emptively defend Tesla here, since they are usually the canonical touch screen example - Tesla cars have a volume thumbwheel on the steering wheel.
What about the passengers? :-)
I find Apple's suggestion to use Siri to control the volume on the AirPods Pro [0] to be worse than some of the ideas on that page. The idea of having a spoken conversation in public in which I must request a volume change via a branded AI (and then repeat that request multiple times if necessary to reach my desired volume) just feels humiliating. [0] "To change the volume, say 'Hey, Siri,' then say something like 'T…
I find Apple's suggestion to use Siri to control the volume on the AirPods Pro [0] to be worse than some of the ideas on that page. The idea of having a spoken conversation in public in which I must request a volume change via a branded AI (and then repeat that request multiple times if necessary to reach my desired volume) just feels humiliating. [0] "To change the volume, say 'Hey, Siri,' then say something like 'T…
I just reach into my pocket and press the physical buttons on the phone. Works pretty well. I do wish there was a way to do it by touching the headphones though. I held off on buying AirPods for a few years mostly for that reason.
Those are still all better than mobile phones that have a dozen "volumes" and when you press the volume up when a video is just starting you might get lucky and lower the media volume, or you might have missed it for one microsecond and now you are stuck on ring or alarm or whatever volume while the video plays.
It’s in Settings > Sounds & Haptics > Change with Buttons.
I never want to change the ringer volume. I just set it to maximum in Settings and use the physical vibrate switch when I want silence.
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Teams’ notifications on Mac are an ongoing debacle. Because they are Microsoft’s own implementation, rather than using the system API, not only do they not respect DND, they also helpfully get lost behind other notifications that come in from properly designed applications. According to the Microsoft admin updates I’m subscribed to, native notifications on Mac have been in a beta channel for months, with a full rollo…
To add insult, the notifications are a separate window on macOS. So when you use cmd+tab to switch _to_ Teams, you might end up in that notifications window. Even when there are no Teams notifications, that window remains. This is very painful when in full-screen mode, as cmd-tabbing to Teams simply doesn’t work. I’m on the beta where you can switch to native notifications, but they’ve only implemented that (poorly)…