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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)

#401

Post by thehappypm »

RubberbandSoul wrote: post #286
temporallobe wrote: post #7

Car manufacturers are easily the winners here. If your car’s audio system doesn’t have a simple knob you can grab and twist, well, that just sucks.

My Nissan has a center console that cedes ALL controls to the rear camera app when the car is put in reverse. So if you have music playing you can twist the physical volume knob all you like while in reverse and nothing will happen! If you parallel park daily you'll probably experience this every time: You jump in the car, start it and put it in reverse. The music will start playing after a couple of seconds at the l…

Maybe it's a reasonable design decision. How often is the car going in reverse? Should you really be fiddling with the UI when the car is in reverse? Sure there could be a passenger, but is it such an inconvenience?

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

#402

Post by kylestlb »

yawaworht1978 wrote: post #369
jhgb wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's an SPA, can't it be greasemonkey'd to display things properly?

Curious, how would you do that? Would it be a long script or is there some sort of mini Library for this?

Browser extension is easiest, https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/

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

#403

Post by hbn »

mortenjorck wrote: post #107
iambateman wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just in case an MS engineer is reading these Teams gripes… On Mac, Teams does not honor system-level Do not Disturb. So when I turn off notifications during a presentation at work and my friend sends me snarky comments about our boss…

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…

Also the sound seems to register itself as a media sound, so it will hijack your play/pause functionality. If I'm playing music and get a call, pressing play/pause to stop my music will just stop the ringing while continuing to play the music. Additionally, if I get a call and pick up, later on if I hit play/pause it'll continue playing the Teams call jingle instead of my music.

It can even be seen in Big Sur with the new playing media icon in the top bar. If I click that I can see that there's an item for my music, and an item for Teams sounds.

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

#404

Post by hnbad »

wutwutwutwut wrote: post #343
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…

So you have signed up for insider builds? Then claiming that they have "randomly thrown" it at you is just odd. You explicitly told them you wanted early builds.

Not OP but I'm in the same boat. I signed up for insider (dev) builds to get X support in WSL2, then set it to switch me back to insider (beta) builds on the next opportunity. But they didn't do another beta or any other insider built really before rolling out Win11 to dev so that's what I got on the next update. There also wasn't any notice this would happen despite my machine apparently not meeting the requirements for Windows 11.

I'm not complaining but it was definitely unexpected for me despite being in the insiders program. Especially given that Windows 11 is being promoted as the "next version of Windows", not just another Windows 10 release.

FWIW my volume slider is still a slider. I have no idea what's going on in that screenshot but either they're A/B testing, this is a weird language-specific UI variant or there's a bug.

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

#405

Post by avel »

JohnWhigham wrote: post #392
SN76477 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I cannot figure out how to adjust my iphone volume half of the time. I think there are two, one is the ringer, one is for the speaker? dunno.

I'm guessing it's probably similar to Android: it's context-specific; with nothing going on, you're controlling your ringer settings. Then you need to wait until music/a game is playing, then you can control the speaker volume. Want to get to the master volume controls? Have fun menu hunting.

That "context aware" concept has been changed for a while now, current versions of Android always have the buttons control the media volume. (If you are in a call, they control the call volume).

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

#406

Post by aitchnyu »

rebuilder wrote: post #232

A modest proposal: When the volume slider reaches its end, it should roll over to the other end for convenience. Thus, we can do away with one of the volume buttons, and just have a single button that decreases the volume until the slider rolls over.

TVS Jive motorcycle had "Rotary Gears - Shift from 4th gear to neutral directly".

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

#407

Post by kaba0 »

onion2k wrote: post #288
rectang wrote: post #6

Nearly all volume controls suck because by and large the software world is ignorant of the fact that loudness scales logarithmically. 99.9% of volume controls scale the output linearly.

Literally no one wants a logarithmic scale to interact with though. '50% volume' should definitely be in the middle of the slider. The OS should translate that in to decibels. The maths behind it has no place in the UI.

I think no one argues for having it visually. They argue for having the GUI linearity converted to appropriate perceptual linearity, which depends on the medium.

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

#408

Post by bobbylarrybobby »

activitypea wrote: post #361

Can someone explain the iPhone one? I've never had an iPhone, it looks just like a simple slider, I don't see the problem. Is the gif not playing for me?

Well, one issue (not shown) is that if your control center has so many items that it scrolls vertically, then there's ambiguity whether you're trying to scroll control center or drag the volume slider. This could have been fixed by making the volume slider horizontal.

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

#409

Post by Ashanmaril »

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…

I don't know, I've used these and I think they're actually kind of ingenious. Perhaps not the most intuitive thing, but once you understand how it works, it's pretty easy to use, and having the entire vertical area you can move your mouse for granularity is probably superior to moving a circle back and forth on a tiny bar.

I imagine this was originally implemented just because they wanted the UI to be a 1-to-1 matching of a soundboard, but it actually has the advantage of what I mentioned (granularity), as well as being able to display the level within a circle, AND you can fit a ton of them on screen without taking up much space. They're actually very functional.

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

#410

Post by frosted-flakes »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #238
na85 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have my old BB10 Passport. Weird form factor but that was an awesome device. It's too bad Blackberry really shit the bed with their OS and its lack of apps.

I still use my BB Classic as a daily driver. Really not looking forward to next April when 3G is switched off in Australia...

The Classic supports 4G, you know.
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