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The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

uxdesign.cc

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Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#351

Post by goodpoint »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #247
leduyquang753 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's commonplace in audio production programs/plugins actually.

Was going to say. It saves screen space - should you need to save screen space - while allowing fine control. A slider would take much more screen area. This is a bigger issue on synth VSTs that have tens or hundreds of controls. When screen resolutions were smaller it was a toss-up between hybrid vertical/rotational scrolling, horizontal/vertical window scrollbars to get the controls to appear at all, and multipage…

You could keep the vertical "out-of-box" dragging but use a little vertical bar to show the current level.

Humans are terrible at reading angles quickly.

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#352

Post by bouke »

johnwalkr wrote: post #333
bouke wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)…

Could be worse. In outlook for Mac, there are native notifications but the only button on them is “delete.” I thought it was dismiss for quite some time. And when you use command-tab to delete search terms, i what it actually does is delete the highlighted email.

Microsoft ignoring default shortcuts or even assigning different behaviour in their various macOS apps is driving me insane. On Teams one cannot even discover shortcuts from the menubar as the menubar doesn’t contain any actions beside undo/redo.

Electron must be the new embrace extend extinguish of macOS.

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#353

Post by Bluecobra »

Afforess wrote: post #231
srswtf123 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ever used Lotus Notes? http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/lotus.htm

An IBMer once explained to me that Lotus Notes was intentionally not improved; it was purposefully bad, a form of coordinated sabatoge. The bugs provided employees with an excuse for why troublesome directives or wasteful meetings were lost. To this day, I still am unsure if they were joking.

Hah, that’s great. Maybe there’s still saboteurs inside still fighting the (good?) fight:

https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/30/ibm_email_outage/

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#354

Post by ioseph »

lights0123 wrote: post #109
titzer wrote: post #85

The volume controls in Tuxguitar are legitimately worse than some posted here. To adjust the volume of a track, you choose "View > Show Instruments" and then the unlabeled first circle in each row is the volume "knob". It's a "knob" because it is basically a circle with a dot with the 6-o'clock position indicating 0 and the 3 o'clock position indicating maximum. To adjust it, you click and hold (with no visual feedba…

Circular knobs in audio contexts that don't support circular mouse movement need to not exist. If you want to have the user drag their mouse up and down, just use a vertical slider .

It comes down to space, a knob can represent more points than a slider for less screen space

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#355

Post by kortex »

fleddr wrote: post #324

It's a long time ago, but I remember a real world volume control even worse than these playful examples. My friend had a Hifi set where turning the volume knob would digitally update the dB value on the display. This in itself is a bad idea, as most people don't understand decibels and how it's a non-linear scale. But it gets worse. The dB value did not indicate current output, it indicated "remaining" dB that the se…

That's pretty common on HiFi. It's not indicating "remaining" per se, the dB value is reduction from line level - -20dB is a 100-fold reduction in output power.

I actually find it pretty convenient since the dynamic range is actually useful (unlike most phones which have a step-change from 0 to 1).

I'm sure it's somewhat deliberate, "only plebs lack understanding of dBs and log scaling. I'm a refined audiophile! "

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#356

Post by hughrr »

baalimago wrote: post #341

This is the new volume control in windows 11 (some insider version they've randomly thrown at me): https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img922/786/aIfxKh.png It's atrocious. No slider, clicking on it "blips" the speakers so you can hear how loud it is. You have to hover pointer on top of it which enlarges the green circle by about 10% to show "Hey, you're hovering me, in case you missed it!" and then scroll so the the tin…

Fuck me that’s just stupid.

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#357

Post by joshuaissac »

hackthememes wrote: post #142
HelixEndeavor wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Developers stubbornly refusing to utilize the tools provided by the operating system because they think they can do it better (90% of the time they can't) is one of my greatest pet peeves. You should ONLY ever use your own engine for things like notifications if the particular OS doesn't support them (pre-10 Windows)

I believe that in this case it's simply convenience/laziness to have a single notifications codebase across both operating systems? That and Windows didn't have native notifications when it was first developed. Not that it excuses a big chat application from MS behaving this way, just saying that they probably didn't deliberately choose to re-implement notifications just because they didn't like the OS ones.

Windows has had balloon notifications since Windows 2000. These show up as toast notifications by default in Windows 10, so compliant applications would be transitioned automatically.

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#358

Post by mabub24 »

baalimago wrote: post #341

This is the new volume control in windows 11 (some insider version they've randomly thrown at me): https://imagizer.imageshack.com/img922/786/aIfxKh.png It's atrocious. No slider, clicking on it "blips" the speakers so you can hear how loud it is. You have to hover pointer on top of it which enlarges the green circle by about 10% to show "Hey, you're hovering me, in case you missed it!" and then scroll so the the tin…

This should be used as a case study for bad UI in courses. You can even tell from just looking at it that it's nonsensical.

Re: The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)

#359

Post by LinAGKar »

ajklsdhfniuwehf wrote: post #130

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.

But now they changed it so it always controls the media volume by default on Android.
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