The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)
uxdesign.cc
uxdesign.cc
But that comes second to the microphone gain control, which Teams similarly exerts unilateral control over - only this time through an automated algorithm that for some microphone types just ends up muting them entirely. It's wild, you can go into the Windows gain control settings and see the slider wiggle around.
In iOS I've never seen an in-app volume control (I assume its forbidden) and all volume adjustments affect the system volume.
Typically games will have them so you can balance out music and interface sounds relative to in-game sounds.
In my opinion a volume mixer is a requirement for a decent user experience. To reuse the game example: if I want to listen to a podcast while playing, I'd better be able to hear the podcast clearly while also hearing the important sounds from the game.
1. Upon first open of the game, turn the music volume to off or 10%.
2. Make any other game noise 30% max.
3. Enjoy being able to play and hear game, while also being able to hear friends on Mumble at reasonable volume.
While I'm on the Silent gripe, mild tangent, but Facebook on Android refusing to follow the Notifications volume and instead following the Ringtone volume is one of the shittiest pieces of UX I have to deal with daily.
I could write a page of the issues like this. Maybe it would not be so bad if you only used Teams but when you use slack at the same time it is like someone is wacking you in the back of the head every few minutes.
To this day, I still am unsure if they were joking.
A day never goes by without a delight.
Edit: IBM Notes
And now the expand/collapse UI pattern with right/down arrows or triangles is standard (e.g. https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/de...). Don't get me wrong, the example button is terrible UI, but an interesting example of how norms change.
On more than one occasion I have misinterpreted the upvote icon on HN to be "collapse thread".
Don’t worry guys, it’s on the roadmap for this month! https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?featur...
Next maybe we can fix issue where if you have the iOS app, you randomly appear available for hours?
A small thing, but one that would annoy me almost every day...
The issue comes from my main language being French. And in French, for some reason, there has to be a space between the word and the colon.
But in Teams, and even Outlook Web, whenever I put a space and colon to introduce a list on the line below, so I type <space><colon><enter>, I end up with a freakin' smiley, so I have to go back, delete it, and put a colon in again.
I feel like this used to work properly until a month or so ago.
The worst bug I've seen, and this is also something that only started happening in the last several months, is select messages simply not appearing! So basically I open my computer in the morning and look at Teams and it'll have messages from overnight. EXCEPT some messages did not make it, like, at all. There was a whole thread that had replies that were simply not visible to me. I even replied to that thread and on my screen the reply appeared right after the last visible message whereas for everyone else it appeared after the 40 or so messages that came in overnight.
I haven't been the only one to run into that issue either. Restarting Teams is the only thing that brought the messages back.
Now that's what I call a critical bug! Who knows how many things I've missed.
MS in particular has the habit of actually introducing small bugs like this regularly through their usual updates. It's infuriating. One day something works the next it just doesn't. I know people who never update their machine because of this. Can't blame them. Once it works, why take the chance of breaking it with updates? It it is a certainty that at some point MS will break some functionality of your system with an update. It's just a matter of time. So turning off auto update is the most sane thing to do for most people. I recommend it myself, and if you update your Chrome or Firefox automatically it is safe enough to use an unpatched Windows for most people anyway.
Once MS started introducing new bugs rather than actually fixing old ones I knew the last MS machine I will service is a gaming machine for my family. As long as that needs to run, I will make it run. All my other systems are on linux now. Once the gaming craze is over I will ceremoniously burn the Windows license key that I used, and I will never, ever, run any software from Microsoft ever again.
Except at work of course, but I don't mind getting paid to be frustrated.
HA!
I was just testing a VR app that has a Windows component when things started failing in VR. I took off my headset and noticed my test machine going through power-on self test.
"Oh crap!", I thought, "a bug caused the system to reboot".
Nope. Just Microsoft deciding it's time to apply some updates. Doesn't matter that I scheduled for a time that I wouldn't be testing.
I've NEVER been able to successfully gain control of this, despite reading up on it and doing all the recommended things.
%windir%\System32\Tasks\Microsoft\Windows\UpdateOrchestratorhttps://www.joe0.com/2019/10/17/how-to-prevent-windows-10-au...
This program used an SPA. The core workflow is hidden and split over multiple "tabs". Tabs include: question, given answer, score awarded. That's right, none of those are available simultaneously. Yes, 70% of its window goes unused when full-screen.
Going through all students can be done in (at least) two ways. In the first, you can press a button to proceed to the next student, but you cannot go back a student. In the other, you click "save" after grading each answer. This returns you to the overview of students.
The overview displays 20 students per 'page' (tiny font, tiny rows), irrespective of your window size. There is no "next student" button, you have to click the student you want to grade. If you're grading past the first page (e.g., student #21): surprise! You're back on page 1. Clicking the student's tiny row requires more precision than you'll need the rest of your work week on modern desktops.
I could go on. I will, actually. Apparently, standard workflow is you can never go back to an already graded answer and points awarded become final; I accidentally used a workflow that didn't have this idiocy).
In short, there is no way this product's core functionality was tested. Any tester would have exclaimed "are you kidding me?!", and have walked out. Or inflict physical violence on their computer. Or whoever hired them.
In short: setting this product on fire is the best reason for bringing back floppies in 25 years.
So: maybe, but the back end is probably too flakey. Official recommendation is to use IE for grading and only one grader may be logged in at any time.
Really, fire is too good for this mess.
[1] https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/01/christ-i-hate-b...
Pass!
- Apple is the designer: I want to make everything beautiful and perfect. Sometimes that pesky messiness of reality gets in the way, but if that's the case, it's reality which should change.
- Google is the engineer: Yeah cool this project sounds good, let's replace that old technology with this new thing that will be so much better! We'll release the prototype in a month, and six months from now we'll have the whole thing done. Hmmm 4 months later, some of those details that took years to refine in the old version are actually pretty tricky, and these weird users like actually want to keep them... Yeah details are hard, let's put this project on back burner because now I'm excited about new project!
- Microsoft is the MBA: Products don't matter! They're just interchangeable widgets the grunts working below me have to concern themselves with. The important thing is what I can sell to upper management with my power-point presentation. We're data-driven, so as long as my KPI's improve, that means I have made the morally correct decision. If I can leverage or trick users into using the product the way I want, it means I'm good at my job!
Teams started ok, but it has become worse than Skype, which is something I didn’t think was possible.
From the company that made MSN messenger it’s hard to believe they didn’t have any lessons learned
Honestly, the best UI Microsoft ever invented were always those inside their video games. I still think AoE2 is hard to beat.
I tend to just ignore the links and download everything because of this.
This is annoying.
Interactions still feel like your mouse pointer is moving through molasses. Notifications are misbehaved trash. Video calls make your CPU beg for mercy (useful if you want to fry eggs on your laptop though). Switching between multiple organisations is still miserable (although at least now you get notifications for other orgs instead of them just getting lost in the aether, never to be seen).
The funny thing is, none of these problems exist on the mobile apps, which are actually quite well-behaved. I guess that's because they have to use system APIs.
That's not my experience at all. It's not great, but it has improved a lot.
https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/what-s-new-in-mic...
But the basics—the things that I mentioned in my previous comment—have remained all but unaddressed for the lifetime of the product so far, and it's utterly miserable to use because of it. They're just piling new features on. I understand why, it's just frustrating.
Audio settings in every app is it's own source of frustration for me. I pretty much test them each time I join a different conferencing or audio related app...
Firefox, either intentionally or unintentionally, does not let Meet do this. I say Meet, because none of the others work on Firefox anyway.
But the recent Meet update is broken on Firefox, so yeah, there goes that.
But yes, going to that kinda length to prevent those applications from messing with the gain control is absurd
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…
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 rollout pushed back repeatedly for no reason that I can discern.
You should ONLY ever use your own engine for things like notifications if the particular OS doesn't support them (pre-10 Windows)
I’m on the beta where you can switch to native notifications, but they’ve only implemented that (poorly) for chat notifications. Calls still use their own notifications. Poorly you ask? Well the notification doesn’t show the sender when posting in a group channel; it uses the group name as the notification title.
My main question is, why are people still doing desktop apps in JS? (Yes, I know, cross-platform... There are other ways to do that.) They always end up breaking with the native UI conventions on the host OS, and they're stupidly resource hungry.
Breaking the native CMD-TAB shortcut is breathtaking…
(Workaround: switch to any other app in 1st space first, then switch to Teams…)
And when you use command-tab to delete search terms, i what it actually does is delete the highlighted email.
Electron must be the new embrace extend extinguish of macOS.
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.
VS Code and Teams are at complete opposite ends of the spectrum for what an Electron app can be.
FWIW I turn off all contact apps (email, chat) entirely if it's important.
Projecting something onto the screen is done using Teams, so I can't disable Teams during the presentation. People often connect in from other conference rooms or their desks, by joining the call.
ICT probably wouldn't allow us to make another user account.
I agree that making a second user account is good practice for IoT meetups, church groups, or other presentations, but it might not actually work well in this company. Teams has plenty of other issues though, such as screen sharing in a group call after unplugging HDMI, or microphone input selection issues.
Why isnt Teams open source. Microsoft supports open source, blah, blah.
Luckily it doesn't do anything bad, it just does nothing.
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 tiny tiny dot gets slightly more enlarged (which clearly indicates new volume, duh). Then it shrinks to a smaller size back when stopping the hover.
Oh, the arrow to the right? Does that open the customary volume slider? No that's the sound device picker. Speaker to the left is the mute. To make matters worse it's in the same "group" as the network symbol is (although there's no network settings when clicking), and sometimes clicking the thing doesn't work at all, depends on how much explorer.exe decides to hang at the moment.
But surely I just got some broken alpha/beta version.
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.
I’ll file a bug just in case it’s not already known.
It's still frustrating though. I can't just click the volume icon and use the mouse scroller to change the volume. It takes two clicks now.
In some apps and sites with a specific purpose the wheel is often mapped more generally: e.g. to volume control in video players regardless of the position, unless it's over the time slider.
No need for any drama.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/ogchx7/volume_ba...
https://pasteboard.co/Kb9u3OY.png
Apple is slipping. (Probably an oversight because of Airpod-centric thinking.)
Everywhere I look: Windows, Android, websites, mobile apps... it's all so terrible. Confusing interfaces (indecipherable icons with no text), ridiculously small or ridiculously large text (either I can't read it without zooming or so large that it fits 3 lines in a 15" screen), endless whitespace, no visual feedback about how to interact with the interface, such as what is clickable or not, etc.
I chalk this up to designers not giving a rat's ass about actually designing their interfaces carefully and thoughtfully, and simply optimising for one things: looking good on screenshots. If you think about it it explains everything about this.
[0] "To change the volume, say 'Hey, Siri,' then say something like 'Turn down the volume.'" -- https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT212203
I’m afraid the joyless Siri just ignores you when you say that.
Like if you say "Alexa, please mute", you could unlock a new voice or a funny joke or something.
Parallel evidence: the Ring acquisition has aggressively integrated itself with police forces.
Partial evidence: some of the devices are known to retain data even after being reset to factory settings (I presume it's a bug).
It has to be listening all the time for its activation command and we have no idea what it's doing with the data that comes in and is determined not to be the activation command.
The best part is that whereas with most commands, if Alexa has any doubt about what you said or you weren’t clear it always asks you to clarify or disambiguate, even various stop/pause/volume-down/mute commands - but when spoken with an angry tone or with an f-bomb or two then she defaults to stopping without question, even if she didn’t hear you clearly.
Not that I disagree with your main point; I refuse to use Siri in public, like you say, it’s humiliating.
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.
Apple's ear buds are the only ones that fit comfortably in my ears so it's sorta my only choice. (The pros do not, which is unfortunate.)
I don't typically run with headphones in so that's not an issue, but even if I did, it's pretty easy to hit the volume button on my phone unless it's in a backpack or something.
I'm always a bit embarrassed when I'm in public and a buddy calls me over to look at something on a MacBook. Like - "No it wasn't me who fell for Apple marketing."
iPhone has squeeze your pocket to change the volume adjustments.
Apple Watch has volume control just using a crown.
AirPods Pro too small to handle a moment or twist.
AirPods Max trials on-head crown and whole better than other product physical controls, quality fine physical gradient control on even a large mounted device is tricky.
https://learnabout-electronics.org/Resistors/resistors_09a.p...
Similarly, most non-AAA game engines ignore the sRGB tone curve and treat all inputs and outputs as if they were linear, which results in unexpected brightness shifts in textures.
Up until very recently, Blender used linear light internally, but output that as sRGB without converting it to the appropriate gamma curve. There's guide after guide online on how to fix Blender by using "filmic" mode, which should be renamed to "not broken" mode.
Same thing as the colour picker in image editors like mspaint or Photoshop. They all have the same rainbow picker that has very visible discontinuities in the colour gradients, like a rippled curtain. It should be smooth, and it is, if using a perception-based colour model instead of linear light output straight to an sRGB monitor without any kind of colour correction.
This kind of thing has been going on for decades, and will continue for decades more. Programming is still a growth industry, so the average developer is inexperienced and doesn't know about these subtleties.
[0] http://blog.johnnovak.net/2016/09/21/what-every-coder-should... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27721094
OKLAB is a perceptual colour space, which is really useful for things like colour-picker tools, image editor controls, web development, CSS styles, etc...
You can use this kind of colour space to make two colours that are equally bright and equally saturated, but exactly 180 degrees apart on the colour wheel. If you use this instead of RGB hex codes, you get much better looking results. It'll make your app or web page "pop" with minimal effort...
The best way to do that, if you are using shaders, is to have "fragColor.xyz = pow(col,vec3(1./2.2))"* on your last line. If it looks bad, look elsewhere, you are not allowed to touch that last line. The opposite should be done just after reading textures, if they aren't already linear.
*: sRGB actually has a weird transfer function, but it is closely approximated by a gamma of 2.2
Best is to properly declare the target framebuffer as sRGB (if it is) and output linear colors while letting the GPU deal with it.
Second, this will prevent HDR.
Most games render to a linear HDR target surface with a very wide dynamic range, and then will tonemap it to the display gamut as the final step. This was common as far back as Valve's Half Life game. I think even the first one did something along these lines!
This is especially important for modern engines that are used by AAA games. E.g. Unreal engine and all similar engines are commonly used for XBox and Playstation games where the output display is a wide-gamut HDR television, not an SDR sRGB computer monitor.
Is this due to linear vs logarithmic scaling? Or are people throwing wild parties where the iPad needs to fill a room with sound?
I’ll often use my iPad as a portable media player and max volume is nice for things like music while showering or cooking in the kitchen.
But I do really think a volume one half of the current lowest would be useful for me.
Wrong. Windows's volume output is the percentage squared, and Linux PulseAudio's volume output is the percentage cubed. Nonetheless I would prefer that the volume output was exponential (2^(slider position / constant)). This way, pressing the "volume up" key 3 times always increases the volume by a constant factor, regardless if you're on loud or quiet speaker/headphones. Additionally, on loud headphones, you won't have to fine-tune the volume in the very bottom of the slider (eg. 1 is too quiet, 2 is a bit loud, 3 is painfully loud).
On Windows, I hide the default volume control and instead use Volume2[1] set to exponential mode. On Linux, I haven't found a good solution for getting PulseAudio to use exponential volumes.
I'm sorry to whoever designed this control for this very useful Free OSS. But goddamn that is bad.
Firstly, you can place the applet at a corner of the panel, e.g. at the bottom right, such that you now have an infinitely large target [1] to hit.
Then, once you have the mouse pointer hovering above it, you can:
- scroll up/down to increase/decrease the volume
- middle click to toggle on/off the sound
For those who possess precise control of the mouse pointer, of course they can still click on an arbitrary spot on the knob to set the volume.
For bonus point, because it is a knob, you always know what is the current volume level. All that for maybe 40x40 pixels of screen real estate only.
[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/fitts-law-and-infinite-width/
Knobs are great in the physical world, never met one on a screen that wasn’t hard to use.
Again, this was back in kde 3 days, where desktop usage was more prominent than laptop, and even on laptop, a mouse with a scroll wheel was still a common accessory since touchpad gesture wasn't really a thing yet.
> Knobs are great in the physical world, never met one on a screen that wasn’t hard to use.
Well, I just gave you a perfect example where a knob on the screen was immensely useful. Of course it will be silly to try copying the physical world as-is, but with a little bit of creativity, applied in the right context, a knob on the screen can absolutely be useful.
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 UIs.
Some designs, like Korg's MS20 VST, had all of the above.
Humans are terrible at reading angles quickly.
◐◑◒◓◐◐◒◒◓◐◓◓◐◐◑◐◒◓◓◐◐◑◒◓
(oops, HN is not showing the unicode rectangles but you can imagine that they look like a barchart and you can easily spot the highest and lowest)
Yes, sliders are better, but if all the controls that should be sliders were sliders then I'd have so many I couldn't see shit. I agree that it's bad to not label controls and hide volume of all things behind a checkbox in a menu.
So yeah, it's not ideal, but that's actually the least worst way for it to work.
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.
>I’m sure a lot of people reading this has, at some point in their careers, felt that urge of innovating no matter what. An uncontrollable desire of redesigning something that hasn’t been redesigned for too long. It has to be recreated. And it has to be innovative. Right?
Made me think of the new Model S and its big dumb yoke. Elon literally reinvented the wheel, and for what? Poor ergonomics to fight 100 years of collective muscle memory and best practice, at a cost of reduced practicality with basic operations like parking, and safety when you move the blinkers and horn to capacitive buttons, and then have the ability to TURN the yoke upside down so that that their positions are inverted and your arms are crossed when you inevitably crash. It's complete lunacy and for no practical benefit. ("13-year-old-me would feel like I'm driving K.I.T.T." is not a practical benefit.)
The application always turned the volume up, all the way to max, whenever it started.
This immediately resulted in me emailing the developers complaining. Surprisingly, they replied! (Although I don't remember what the reply was.)
I haven't used it personally so all I can say is it's a hilarious solution.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/02/im-obsessed-with-the-ford-...
Now we have a chip shortage, and not even a radio with volume control can be made without a chip that is backordered for 1y+
Even if it's objectively worse in absolutely every possible dimension you could ever grade it on.
Or put another way: those potential passengers should get their own Tesla, because more teslas are better for the environment.
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 level that you had during your noisy commute. You now have the choice to put your car in neutral, change the volume and then go back to reverse and exit your parking spot OR try to navigate out of your parking spot with music blasting.
Now I feel stupid, but it's quite possible that it has been patched during a yearly service.
And is an actual potentiometer with stops at min/max volume, not some kind of digital encoder wheel that debounces my input away when I spin it down fast because I want it quiet right now and both my hands somewhere else.
- bad phone number inputs
- how large node packages can get
- software interview process
- backend vs front end engineers
And my favorite meme was when they parodied the Hawaii missile alarm back a few years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/7qk25w/an_...
That's exactly what this post reminded me of.
The bad phone number input 'prompt' is, I'd say, classic at this point. I don't know which URL started it all, but here are a couple:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/651hfm/i_s...
Bonus HN posts:
Show HN: I've made a rotary dial number input, because why not? (2019) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21234891) 190 points 86 comments
Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Phone Numbers (2016) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11321236) 236 points 122 comments
Google's phone number handling library (2014) (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8574080) 284 points 42 comments
I'd look at something he'd done with controls snaking left and right as you scanned down the dialog, and I'd (sigh to myself internally, and) say "OK, go ahead and clean it up and check it in", and he'd look confused and ask "clean what up?"
He was actually UI blind in the same way some people are face blind...
Sure, it would be a little easier to use with some extra UI tweaks - e.g. aligned correctly (10x10 instead of 11x10), digits padded & maybe larger click areas - but the general idea of being able to click once and get the desired volume is pretty powerful: you can technically do that on a scale, but accuracy is tricky and the annotation isn't as detailed.
I'm not saying it's better than a scale (a certain compromise on granularity provides the optimum solution), but it's hardly a candidate for "worst".
I remember it happening live and the endless up-anteing was amazing! Just when you thought the trend was dead someone would drop a new more elaborate take.
https://tineye.com/search/af9c3fe10f5da6775143aa30a421733c4f...
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.
The same thing happens with brightness too. Turn it up full, suddenly, down to 3/4's again until you acknowledge yes, you really do actually want to turn your brightness up full.
The first time it happened I was outside in the sun and couldn't actually see my screen to figure out why it dimmed again, i kept trying to brighten it and it kept dimming, I finally noticed the popup on the bottom in the brief second of lightness I had after the 4th or 5th try.
I really hate the way devices try to control you rather than allowing you to control them.
On my old rooted android phone from years ago, I had alsamixer installed and could turn the volume up however I pleased, even above the artificial software limits present in all android versions.
I miss those days.
The volume warning is required by EU regulations, so it's hard to blame the OS maker for that. I do, however blame Google for increasingly trying to discourage rooting and providing facilities to app makers to prevent their apps from running on rooted devices.
They could, however have implemented the volume warning in a manner easier to defeat.
I don't understand why the concept of 'rooting'(as it applies to android) exists. I purchased my phone, with money, why in the actual fuck are there hundreds-thousands of folders and files my pocket computer will not let me touch?
I'm really tired of the 'safety before freedom' mentality that seems to exist these days. Humanity's managed to exist this long without being nanny'd and the people trying to do the nannying are also human.
I think the motivation for things like Safetynet is that general-purpose computers aren't good for business. If the user has full control, they might block ads, pirate content, or use content they legitimately paid for in a way a service provider wants to charge extra for.
But the regulations most certainly do not require the warning to pop up when the volume is still to quiet to hear that guy in the video talking, which is the actual complaint. If the warning actually appeared the moment when the volume is about to get really loud, it would be cool.
The underlying problem is, of course, that the volume control only slightly correlates with the actual volume that comes from the headphones.
Which makes concrete regulations about volume levels nonsensical however well-intentioned.
However in Windows this is broken for Bluetooth headsets and it's been a known bug since forever. Last time I checked they didn't fix it and it doesn't seem to be a priority.
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.
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 set could output.
So if the value is 0, it means volume is at full output. Of course, you'd normally notice that when music is playing, but you can have the scare of your life when thinking its down and then switching input sources. Or turning of music, dialing down, and then turning it on again.
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! "
That's called "dBFS" (= decibel full scale) and pretty standard in the professional digital audio. For example, that's how every VU meter in a DAW works.
But I would agree that it is not best idea for a consumer device :-)
I liked I could physical switch kill my phones sound so if you were browsing Twitter or whatever on public transport you knew it would always be muted. Now if you click on a video in most apps it will just ignore the mute and start playing it at likely full volume.
The physical mute switch only seems to truly silence the ringer and the OS overrules it if it thinks you want to listen to video.
If I accidentally press the Siri button, it does the Siri beep at a hazardous 100%!
Clearly an engineering oversight, but any volume control that could cause hearing loss has to be the worst.
I created a volume control panel that combines the sound Volume with C:\ Volume and links them together. If you wanted the sound louder, you had to fill up your C: more to raise the disk use percentage. I was proud of it.
Move it to 0%/200% by whatever means you'd like, then use keyboard increments to return it to 100%.
I remember googling how to solve the issue, and I remember solving it back then, but I dont remember what it was. And it still happens sometimes, I have a feeling its related to some specific files being played.
It is ridiculous nonetheless
Agreed the UX on the watch itself to adjust is a pain, thankfully the headphones I have are adjustable to it's quicker to do it there when I need to.
I got the Air instead of the Pro basically for the hardware brightness / volume keys and lack of Touch Bar. It’s such a relief to use these keys without taking eyes off the screen and to not accidentally tap something on the Touch Bar that breaks flow.
By the way, I think you can edit the Touch Bar to replace the volume slider with volume mute/down/up “buttons” instead of the slider which makes it a little better.
Touch-and-drag on the volume buttons to immediately drop into a volume slider, relative to where your finger started.
It's a pretty nice interaction, honestly - better in most ways than the buttons alone I think, in part because you can be both more precise and make large changes faster. It's one of the VERY few places where I think the touchbar does something positive[1]. But the vast majority of people who would like to use it have no idea it exists.
[1]: ... except when the touchbar freezes while doing this, and continually sets "max volume! MAX VOLUME! MAAAX VOOOLLLUUUUUUUMMEEE!!!!" several times per second until you do a hard shutdown to stop it from blaring [whatever you were listening to] at you because it's also stealing focus from whatever's on screen so you can't even click the "yes please shut down" button. Then I'm somewhat less fond of it.
Personally I don't have a terrible aversion to the touchbar, but my biggest gripe is that my right hand naturally rests in a position that randomly presses the mute button.
I probably use this feature 10-20 times a day, and it would be a noticeable irritation for me if it was key based. I am disappointed they're dropping the touchbar in upcoming M1x/M2 macbooks, I would definitely have preferred a touchbar. Apple, are you seeing this?
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.
Edit: I see you can enable it, does it default to off on the touchbar Macbooks?
Well done Apple.
On my 2014 Mac Mini, the Apple remote works fine for pausing, adjusting volume, and going into sleep mode with a long pause press.
I use it every single day and hate it every single day.
You spin the wheel on the keyboard, and the overlay appears on screen to let you know the volume has changed. Or you pop open the menu and adjust it there. Everything looks good. But the volume doesn't change.
Because sometimes, the sound is coming out of the speakers, but the volume control is somehow attached to the monitor port on my microphone. So when you're adjusting the volume, you're adjusting the volume of that.
This is a corporate build of Ubuntu 18, so it's pretty ancient. If i boot into current Fedora - same hardware, same desktop environment - it works fine.
If that is bad UI someone please tell the Android developers.
Getting real tired of the volume control warning me it's too loud and might damage my ears. It's plugged into a a damn aux jack.
See also: https://piunikaweb.com/2021/01/28/ios-14-2-update-disables-o...
“Reduce loud sounds automatically“ cannot be turned off here, not even if you change your region. The only real solution is to keep classifying Bluetooth sound outputs and lighting adapters manually when you connect a new one. I’m fairly certain that even that feature was added in after they implemented the main automatic volume limit thingy because I remember looking through every option and forum for a solution. It for me annoyed enough that I was considering going back to Android at that time.
I wanted something more convenient than the Denon app for changing inputs and volume on my Denon A/V receiver, poked around a bit and found that the receiver has an HTTP API that the app uses, and decided to make a simple web page that could use that API. I could then add that to favorites in Safari and then control the receiver from the browser.
Here it is: https://imgur.com/a/ExkhOgO
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.
It's nice that you can. But as clear affordances go, that really isn't one.
My only gripe is that my 16” MBP gets so hot using the touch bar burns my finger.
Can't believe mature people in that company thought sliding your finger through to change the volume or temperature, when in a moving car, was a good idea. (even their steering wheel controls are touch sensitive).
The Germans are way behind in basic software/ui/ux design, to the point that having normal knob controls is considered a huge feature.
> No one needs to
Tesla's new steering wheel comes to mind. I love my Model 3, but I'm never buying another Tesla if I have to deal with a weirdo steering wheel.
On say youtube, scrolling down on the volume control reduces the volume.
On spotify (well the webplayer anyway), scrolling down increases the volume.
Evidently there isn't much standardization between devices. Personally I don't find it that annoying - devices remember what volume I last set them to.
But how about complex impedance? The phone could measure that instead. A perfectly inefficient speaker -- one where you're holding the diaphragm in place with your fingers, maybe, or where you've removed the magnet with a hammer -- will have a reactive component. It'll look like an inductive load if it's an old-school speaker with a voice coil, or a capacitive load if it uses a piezo transducer.
In either case, a perfectly efficient element that radiates all of the incoming energy would look more like a pure resistance, much like a properly-matched antenna at RF. So there might be some room to implement your suggestion, given a bit of R&D effort.
Tesla actually seems to have gotten this part of the Bluetooth implementation right and it syncs the car’s volume with your phone’s volume.
For my WH1000 (it’s been the same with the XM2, XM3 and XM4 models), if I switch from my phone to my laptop, the laptop will leave the volume label set to say 80, but set the devices actual volume to 20. The quick fix is to pair it back to the phone, turn it all the way up and resync to the laptop.
The worst volume control user interfaces (2017) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19407334 - March 2019 (19 comments)
The Touch Bar volume control is almost right except it's too damn slow. Dragging the volume button works, but the control doesn't start for another 500ms. Try touching it and immediately swiping all the way left, the finger will leave the bar before the control opens. Sigh.
I've been working with this idea for a while. Here's a year ago https://youtu.be/0Ot0j4R36b8
Sorry for the ramble below I'm kinda obsessed about this:
The basic theory is the current bottleneck for computing is input devices not being versatile and expressive enough. The computer is waiting for us these days. How can someone do interface "chunking" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunking_(psychology)) if they have something other than buttons at their disposal. Are their new UI paradigms to exploit?
The interfacing is thru python and is part of a larger music exploration project I've got terribly documented. That's kinda the "first application" just like office productivity was the first application of WIMP. It makes the goal of intuitively navigating multidimensional problems through geospatial and tactile interfacing less abstract.
The actual script is here https://github.com/kristopolous/music-explorer/blob/master/t...
I was exploring everything from browser tab controls to instrumenting software debuggers to window management with this thing so it's kinda a mess. There's a lot of code scattered in my various projects on this topic
The biggest UI fumble is the value repetition and tactility is great until the context of the control changes and then you get a discontinuous jump.
The "obvious" workaround of using relative values has the random walk problem. You need a disengagement mode to reset it from wandering off to one of the edges. That's a flow disrupting cognitive shift (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_shifting)
I tried using 2 cheap arduino joy controllers (example https://satkit.com/image/cache/catalog/products/arduino-joys...) and allocate one joy for mode and the other one for value (inspired from orbitouch https://c1.neweggimages.com/ProductImage/A446_13123722022688...) it works fine with logarithmic relative values. (Going to value 0 and max are common)
Also both these models are about giving the thumbs more jobs then just a single key, an idea I stole from Maltron (http://www.micwil.com/images/gallery/maltron_keyboards_dual_...). Sliding a control right next to a conventional keyboard base should be doable on the cheap and help get towards the goal. The joys were a better solution for this but then I'd have to "sell" something which I'm trying to avoid.
My earlier method involved a USB foot pedal which acted as a quasimode for control (example: https://www.geeky-gadgets.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/usb... ... it can be assigned to something like "Hyper" in Xorg parlance, see here https://github.com/kristopolous/tools/blob/master/bin/footpa...) and then my lua scriptable window manager captured the key strokes and delegated things accordingly (example: https://github.com/kristopolous/crappy-notion/blob/master/mo...). It's still just "buttons" at the end though and this whole project is about integrating sliders knobs and joys to general computing.
I just hope to get everything done satisfactorily with the midi, I don't have to manufacture anything and it's a far easier technical investment for casual people and the device in the video is only $40.
I don't want to "own" anything here. I want people to liberally iterate and innovate as much as possible. I'm certainly not the smartest person in the room.
Unfortunately I have to use it almost daily.
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.
That being said, I get what you mean and why this would be frustrating. I've also had a call end and been absolutely ROCKED by how loud the underlying music had been because I forgot I had it set that high and the call obviously wasn't that loud.
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!
Thanks. I just did the same. Not sure why I didn't see that before.
http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scroll...
(Damn, it's already been over a decade already since it ended?)
And considering Waves were designed to potentially be extremely long, I can understand what they were trying to achieve.
I am ok with design that fails while trying to solve real problems, as opposed to what we have today, where designs fail because they’re trying to either look better or match the current UI fad.
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.
likely 90% of people will not even have that option.
i see it on android11+ with the samsung UI extras. There's no such option in the other 12 devices i looked at just now.
cyanogen always had this as an option.
I disapprove that. While jokes there indeed packs some hilarity and/or creativity, the title implies its real world UI misdesign, not just stuff made for giggles.
Seriously, we have tons of terrible UI solutions actually deployed and used. It might be much less funny to find them and make a gallery, tho.