[HN Gopher] The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)
___________________________________________________________________
The worst volume control UI in the world (2017)
Author : yankcrime
Score : 703 points
Date : 2021-07-13 10:30 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (uxdesign.cc)
(TXT) w3m dump (uxdesign.cc)
| fomine3 wrote:
| YouTube Music on browser only offers single usable volume level:
| mute+1. Upper is not usable since volume is too high. (So some of
| "worst volume control" on article is better than this since it's
| somewhat configurable). It is really weird since YouTube on same
| browser offers wide range of usable volume level.
| rebuilder wrote:
| 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.
| aitchnyu wrote:
| TVS Jive motorcycle had "Rotary Gears - Shift from 4th gear to
| neutral directly".
| aiisahik wrote:
| I would like to nominate the macbook pro touchbar
|
| I use it every single day and hate it every single day.
| tenaciousDaniel wrote:
| I've used it multiple times a day for over a year, and I still
| need to consciously _think_ about what I 'm pressing when I use
| it. Ridiculous.
| einr wrote:
| Oh, the number of times I've absentmindedly adjusted the
| screen brightness when I meant to adjust volume or vice
| versa...
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Some good chuckles but shoulda cut the Insights And Takeaways
| section
| arriu wrote:
| The one asking the user to make noise as loud as you want the
| volume to be made me laugh but it does have a hidden feature...
| It will never be lower than ambiant noise. Perhaps a desireable
| feature?
| _tom_ wrote:
| Came here to advocate for this feature. You need to be able to
| set a minimum volume, so quiet sounds are audible over the
| current level of background noise.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| It made me laugh too, but imagine if you were blind. Would be
| about as simple as it would get to set the volume in that case.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Some sort of "set to X decibels louder than ambient noise"
| feature would be pretty amazing, actually.
| [deleted]
| slacktide wrote:
| My car does this and it's annoying as crap. Luckily it is
| easily disabled. Audi calls it GALA - "Graduated Audio Level
| Adjustment."
| Sebb767 wrote:
| In my VW it's linked to the car speed and I would not want
| to give this away. Turning the volume up and down when
| entering the highway or a slow stretch was _really_
| annoying on my old car.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| I would think the best version would just be a button you
| push when you want to adjust the volume to a "reasonable"
| level. I agree that continuously varying the volume would
| be annoying.
| acomar wrote:
| it's also remarkably intuitive. like I laughed and then
| realized that would be a fairly pleasant way to control the
| volume for anyone with decent vocal control.
| stefan_ wrote:
| I think the worst UI is simply the Teams one, because it presents
| as an app volume control but then simply controls the _global
| device volume_. Fuck off, you are not the only app running.
|
| 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.
| spoonjim wrote:
| What I find perplexingly awesome about how terrible Teams is is
| the fact that now people don't keep bothering me all day with
| useless messages. The software is so terrible that like a gas
| station bathroom you just get in, do what you need to, and get
| out.
| malshe wrote:
| OMG, this is so damn accurate! Thanks for that gas station
| analogy!
| duxup wrote:
| I just don't think there's a good answer.
|
| 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...
| neilpanchal wrote:
| But wait! there's more (Google Meet and Microsoft Teams):
| https://neil.computer/notes/oh-sorry-i-was-on-mute/
| aasasd wrote:
| Alas Teams is far from the only app to control the global
| volume, and it doesn't happen only in Windows.
| aasasd wrote:
| BTW, the most ridiculous instance of this that I've met is
| when a game fiddled with the OS-global volume when I adjusted
| the volume in the game's options.
| skinkestek wrote:
| The +4 people icon still gets me after a year as I click it to
| see who else is in the meeting.
|
| Luckily it doesn't do anything bad, it just does nothing.
| bostonsre wrote:
| Zoom does the same thing with my volume. Seems kind of an odd
| design choice that is pretty malware-y.
| varenc wrote:
| I understand the motivation. A user might set an app's volume
| low and raise the system volume very high to compensate. But
| then audio from another program, likely Teams, might blow your
| ears out when it starts. In a vacuum, I like the idea, but
| given that the standard on Desktop is in-app volume control
| Teams' behavior sounds worse.
|
| In iOS I've never seen an in-app volume control (I assume its
| forbidden) and all volume adjustments affect the system volume.
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Cap every app's local volume setting at lowest in use by any
| app & only allow user to raise volume above this threshold
| explicitly for currently focused app
| reificator wrote:
| > _In iOS I 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.
| _carbyau_ wrote:
| Gaming with friends online.
|
| 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.
| HelixEndeavor wrote:
| I will say I find the inconsistency in whether a game will
| obey the physical Silent switch on iOS to be annoying at
| times. I'll _know_ I have my volume turned up but oh, this
| game is being silent because Silent is on. At the very
| least that should be an option.
|
| 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.
| dannyw wrote:
| I'm confident it's intentional at this point - they
| probably A/B tested alternatives and realised this gives
| them the highest engagement.
| HelixEndeavor wrote:
| Oh, it's painfully obvious that it's intentional, and
| that's what makes it truly infuriating. I can tolerate a
| genuine mistake from a developer, no biggie, we're all
| human, yadda yadda, I * _cannot*_ tolerate Zuckerborg
| condescendingly ignoring my own decisions and autonomy
| with my device and asserting that his stupid app is more
| important than anything else in my life at any given
| moment.
| toss1 wrote:
| Seems that, since the right volume to adjust is dependent on
| so many contextual variables, the right thing to do is to
| display two sliders, one for app & one for the system volume,
| and let the user adjust the appropriate one.
| teekert wrote:
| Yeah, also, sometimes my volume buttons are not controlling my
| headphone, the headphone that I'm using and is the only thing
| producing sound at that time. It takes some time but you'll
| learn that you need to set the sound output differently in the
| Windows taskbar itself. And then later of course, you need to
| set it back because you don't want all sound to go through the
| headset you just wear while in a meeting and put down as soon
| as you end a call...
| pfortuny wrote:
| Do you know Teams also adds white noise _globally_?
| bookaway wrote:
| Teams, Google Meet, Webex, Zoom -- on Chromium, they all hijack
| and increase your microphone volume without you knowing. It's
| infuriating. Just thinking about it pisses me off. You have to
| have the volume control open and have a live tug-of-war with
| the app while you're talking.
|
| 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.
| yoz-y wrote:
| Skype has a checkbox to stop it from doing that, but then
| ignores the setting and does it anyway. Ruined a few podcast
| recordings for me.
| cycomanic wrote:
| Zoom works without problems on Firefox here (Linux). The
| browser version tends to be much better than the app, which
| crashes for me consistently.
| nullify88 wrote:
| Krisp, a noise cancelling application, is able to lock the
| microphone levels. I believe this works even without it on /
| without the trial timer counting down.
|
| But yes, going to that kinda length to prevent those
| applications from messing with the gain control is absurd
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| Users can complain but they cannot switch. :)
|
| Why isnt Teams open source. Microsoft supports open source,
| blah, blah.
| alfredbez wrote:
| OT: We used MS Teams and Slack and management recently decided
| to close our Slack workspace and switch to MS Teams. Most of
| our devs are unhappy with Teams so we switched to a selfhosted
| zulip instance and we're very happy with that.
| tclancy wrote:
| Oh, it could be much worse. You could be using Teams on OSX.
| Nothing behaves properly. I've spent at least a day of work
| time trying to get rid of the hidden window for notifications
| which prevents keyboard focus from ever working.
| nothis wrote:
| Microsoft's UX incompetence to market dominance ratio continues
| to baffle me. I've pretty much settled on blaming this on MS
| winning some race to first OS/Office software useable enough
| for mass adoption and just forcing all the rest since. If you
| think of productivity hours destroyed because of Excel quirks
| and Windows rebooting at the worst possible time, this is maybe
| the most damage a monopoly has ever done to the economy. But
| the people who had the power to stop this probably use Word and
| own Microsoft stock. We're stuck.
| mianos wrote:
| Teams is the reference for bad UI. Paste a code block. Select a
| word in the code block. Copy and you get the whole block copied
| not the selected word.
|
| 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.
| gitgud wrote:
| One thing that always bugged me in MS Teams is that when you
| do the shortcut for :thumbs-up it always presents 20 thumbs-
| down emojis first instead (due to alphabetical order)... but
| people are way more likely to use thumbs-up! Why not put that
| first!!!
|
| A small thing, but one that would annoy me almost every
| day...
| vladvasiliu wrote:
| This reminds of something that aggravates me to no end and
| cannot turn off: emoticons / emojis. I never use those but
| it keeps offering those by switching typing focus to the
| popup.
|
| 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.
| nescioquid wrote:
| This floored me: when the app decides you typed an emoji,
| you can undo (ctrl+z) to get back to what you actually
| typed. That never would have occurred to me to try,
| simply because the mental model I have of "undo" pertains
| to things _I_ did, not the app.
| Beldin wrote:
| I was grading an online exam yesterday. You're lucky.
|
| 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.
| dash2 wrote:
| Could this by any chance be Blackboard [1]?
|
| [1] https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2014/01/christ-i-
| hate-b...
| andrepd wrote:
| Blackboard has to be the worst software I ever had the
| misfortune of having to interact with. How come
| universities spend millions of dollars every year on such
| a steaming pile of crap?
| nicoburns wrote:
| I don't think Blackboard is an SPA (it's just very slow
| server rendered), but it's UI really is terrible. I wrote
| a script to scrape my course materials when I was at uni,
| it was that bad.
| jhgb wrote:
| If it's an SPA, can't it be greasemonkey'd to display
| things properly?
| Beldin wrote:
| I had a hiccup pressing a button once. Was kicked back to
| initial screen and the student was "locked" - which
| requires an admin to reset.
|
| 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.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| Curious, how would you do that? Would it be a long script
| or is there some sort of mini Library for this?
| kylestlb wrote:
| Browser extension is easiest,
| https://addons.mozilla.org/en-
| US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/
| muskox2 wrote:
| As a student, I've never had any edtech site or "online
| textbook" that had good UX. It wouldn't be so offensive if
| I didn't have to pay $80 per semester per course for the
| privilege of using something that is never as good as a
| real textbook.
| raxxorrax wrote:
| I think the success of Teams was a surprise to MS. It was
| ingenious to copy slack and push it on enterprise users
| though.
| Sanguinaire wrote:
| It's no surprise, that was classic MS strategy. Sell the
| thing everyone actually needs (Office, because they
| smothered the competition), but bundle it with something
| sticky which will also hoover up data about your workers -
| no need for the product to be any good, execs in charge of
| purchasing won't have to suffer with it for a fraction of
| the time employees spend. Oh also, I happen to have $200k
| of Azure credits here for you - no pressure but if you do
| start using Azure we'll make the bill for all this
| productivity software go away...
| skohan wrote:
| I feel like this aligns with the cartoon of big tech in
| my head, which goes something like this:
|
| - 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!
| piokoch wrote:
| My the most favorite one is when someone pastes link in a
| chat to MS Office document on Sharepoint/Onedrive. It is
| opened in Teams and when you close the document you might
| naively assume you will be back in the chat you came from but
| no, you end up on the main screen and you need to search for
| the chat window again.
| culopatin wrote:
| Which is impossible because it throws meetings with chats
| all in the same list so you have 3000 things going on. Not
| to mention that meetings that ended 3 weeks ago still have
| active chats. Or if you were invited once now you're
| forever attached to the chat of all the meetings that come
| after, even if you're not invited.
|
| 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
| azalemeth wrote:
| Ahh, but MSN messenger was not the best of all chat
| clients in its day either. I remember advertisement
| aplenty, spam, terrible "candy bar" UIs and a password
| reset system that basically let others steal your account
| easily. I think I used the official client maybe twice at
| an upper limit.
|
| Honestly, the best UI Microsoft ever invented were
| _always_ those inside their video games. I still think
| AoE2 is hard to beat.
| culopatin wrote:
| I mean it was pretty cancerous but it was stable and
| simple to use. A list of your chats sorted by last
| activity. Towards the end you could even play games.
| Voice messages, gifs, etc. It was a free ms product from
| the early 2000s, in 20 years we should've gotten much
| further ahead, instead we went backwards
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| And don't even think about looking at the document and
| commenting something about it in the chat, and then looking
| again... because it seems impossible to have the document
| and the chat open at the same time.
|
| I tend to just ignore the links and download everything
| because of this.
| koyote wrote:
| > Paste a code block. Select a word in the code block. Copy
| and you get the whole block copied not the selected word.
|
| 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.
| phreack wrote:
| I've had that happen on Slack mobile so much I just don't
| trust it anymore. I always tell people (even if it seems
| counterintuitive) to email me when things are urgent
| because very rarely (or not, since I can't tell), it's
| decided not to show me critical messages.
| ljm wrote:
| I get that a lot. A DM arrives, there's a red blob with a
| number next to the sender's name, but the actual message
| doesn't appear.
| r1ch wrote:
| Everyone I've talked with has experienced this, yet it's
| been a bug for _years_. I don 't understand. Do Slack not
| use their own product?!
| BurnGpuBurn wrote:
| Outlook also has had this problem of emails just not
| showing up. Sometimes it takes a whole day for an email to
| arrive. Amazingly low quality for such a wide used product.
|
| 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.
| OGWhales wrote:
| On the same note, it takes practically all day for the
| iOS outlook app to update my email. My organization
| doesn't allow for the default mail app to work anymore,
| so I am stuck with this worthless email app.
| scott-smith_us wrote:
| > I know people who never update their machine because of
| this.
|
| 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.
| wizzwizz4 wrote:
| I'm convinced the "schedule" thing doesn't actually do
| anything. It worked in Windows 8, and that's the last
| version of Windows where updating was (almost) tolerable.
| tokamak-teapot wrote:
| I spend too much time sitting waiting for people to join
| meetings that have been cancelled or moved - and Outlook
| / Teams don't know yet. I'm connected - I know this
| because I'm sitting there 'in' the meeting. I'm receiving
| emails. I'm talking to people on Teams... Argh.
| danmur wrote:
| It absolutely did, it's only just started doing it
| recently. Drives me freaking nuts.
| iamhamm wrote:
| Mine is doing a variation of this now. If I'm on a call,
| messages stop coming through but I'll see them on my
| mobile. When I end the call, they still don't come in until
| I restart the app!
| audiometry wrote:
| stupid teams chat doesn't even have a 'reply with quote' but
| yeah, it's got lots of edgy emoticons and gifs.... stupid.
| _n_b_ wrote:
| > stupid teams chat doesn't even have a 'reply with quote'
|
| 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?
| abakker wrote:
| Amazingly, the mobile app version does!
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Consistency, the one weakness of MS. Like when their own
| official OneNote app for Windows Phone 8 had fewer
| features than the Android version.
| pindab0ter wrote:
| Because why would your app have consistent functionality
| for such basic features between web/desktop versions and
| mobile!
| fomine3 wrote:
| Pro tip: don't press Ctrl before release mouse button
|
| This is annoying.
| srswtf123 wrote:
| Ever used Lotus Notes?
|
| http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/lotus.htm
| Afforess wrote:
| 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.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| 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/
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| The "too many windows, you need to close one before opening
| another" message is also present in current versions of
| Adobe Acrobat.
| koilke wrote:
| Currently used at my workplace.
|
| A day never goes by without a delight.
|
| Edit: IBM Notes
| retzkek wrote:
| > While many users would at first glance conclude that the
| "arrow" on the topmost button is an indicator that this is
| the currently selected button, it is used to indicate that
| this is a "special" (a.k.a. inconsistent and undesirable)
| type of button. Clicking on the arrow causes the button to
| "open" (downward) to reveal a variety of folders. Why the
| designers chose to use an arrow pointing to the right to
| indicate downward movement is one of the many mysteries of
| this program.
|
| 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".
| etaioinshrdlu wrote:
| The "Enter Password" at the bottom of that page is simply
| great.
| namdnay wrote:
| So without defending Lotus Notes in any way, there was a
| meaning to the symbols: they were defined by some oneway
| function from what you were typing. So you would get used
| to the little symbol dance, and know if and when you'd
| mistyped
| ptx wrote:
| Wouldn't it also allow any onlookers, if they are able to
| memorize the symbol dance, to derive your password one
| character at a time by trial and error?
| namdnay wrote:
| No because it also depended on your computer . I remember
| when you switched computers it would change
| sam_bristow wrote:
| I seem to recall the password was client-side too. So if
| you had Lotus Notes in a VM and you restored from a save
| point you needed to remember what your password was when
| you did the save.
| xarope wrote:
| as an ex-IBMer, tragically yes...
| prox wrote:
| What the heck! What were these "designers" having when they
| made that monstrosity? Hahaha.
| sam_bristow wrote:
| Even worse than Teams is Teams on GovCloud.
| hnick wrote:
| We had network issues the other day and a few minutes into
| the meeting we realised my audio stream was delayed by a
| whole minute. There was no indication on the Teams UI this
| was happening. I'd hear a question about a window I'd already
| closed on screen share, type a response, and they got it a
| minute after asking. As someone who uses Discord at home,
| Teams is pain.
| spoonjim wrote:
| LOL. I wonder where that data was physically sitting for a
| whole minute.
| hnick wrote:
| I don't really know how these things work but it was
| quite crisp while my outgoing was very choppy so I hung
| up the mic and resorted to typing. I was assuming a lot
| of packet loss and it was rebuilding a little behind the
| times, the network was very slow that day in general but
| the voices were clear.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Paging Animats... Animats to the HN courtesy desk...
| aoms wrote:
| At Rest.....
| ncann wrote:
| Yeah, Teams is notoriously bad for software engineering
| related messages. It wastes a shit ton of horizontal space
| and every code block/log snippet that you send is horribly
| displayed with big font and scrollbars. Of all the things
| compared to Slack this infuriates me the most.
| deergomoo wrote:
| We've been using Teams since the pandemic started and we
| switched to WFH. It started off awful, and in that time, it
| hasn't got better in any material way.
|
| 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.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| >It started off awful, and in that time, it hasn't got
| better in any material way.//
|
| 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...
| Lurkars wrote:
| Also nice that it controls playback of other apps. Intended as
| a nice feature: your listening to music, accept incoming call,
| music stops, hang up, music starts again. Sounds nice, in
| practise it starts randomly music during calls. Or you stopped
| music for hours, accepting a low level call and raise your
| volume,hang up and get blasted away by your loud music starting
| to play.
| bennyp101 wrote:
| Yea, if I have Spotify paused - having not listened to it all
| day - after a call it starts it playing again.
| maverwa wrote:
| Or my favorite. Accepting a call, manually pausing music
| using media keys, call ends, I try to resume my music using
| media keys, resume Teams ringing sound instead. Thanks teams,
| I really wanted to here that tune again!
| bserge wrote:
| It's OK, they're fixing it soon by having Teams be part of the
| OS :D
| gambiting wrote:
| I literally had to install a virtual microphone device with a
| fake driver and make teams use that - otherwise it would keep
| adjusting my real microphone gain despite it being perfectly
| fine. The virtual microphone cannot have the level adjusted at
| all, so teams can't do anything, but it's just SO STUPID. Just
| have an option to either auto-adjust or not, don't force it on
| everybody.
| eulgro wrote:
| Try to zoom any document, it zooms the whole app. I'm surprised
| it doesn't zoom the whole operating system honestly, or change
| my screen resolution.
| HelixEndeavor wrote:
| Try to zoom a document and it zooms an image file of your
| entire hard drive.
| manmal wrote:
| I think Zoom does the same thing on macOS, or at least it did
| last year.
| watwut wrote:
| Microsoft Teams UI is so bad in so many different ways. And in
| worst way possible - where it works enough for management to
| not ditch it, but doing something ridiculous on every occasion.
| k12sosse wrote:
| What's your uservoice suggestion URL? Will vote for it.
| iambateman wrote:
| 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...
| johnwalkr wrote:
| And when you share your screen the entire meeting window is
| minimized, helpfully showing your entire chat window.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Pro-tip: make a second user account on your system
| exclusively for presentations. There's nothing more
| unprofessional than some stupid notification popping up
| during a presentation.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| That's a valid workaround that shouldn't be needed.
|
| FWIW I turn off all contact apps (email, chat) entirely if
| it's important.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Is that easier than just switching user account?
| Essentially all we're talking about is having a separate
| environment. Maybe desktop environments could support
| multiple environments per user more easily, but it's not
| too bad to set it up with a separate user account.
| fuzzmz wrote:
| That doesn't really work when the app you're presenting
| with is actually MS Teams, as for whatever reason, during
| a call when you're screen sharing, Teams still shows
| notification pop-ups.
| mortenjorck wrote:
| 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 rollout pushed back repeatedly for no
| reason that I can discern.
| [deleted]
| robin_reala wrote:
| I have native mac notifications? Menu / Settings /
| Notifications / Notification style / Mac.
| bouke wrote:
| 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)
| 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.
| lillesvin wrote:
| They're registered as a separate window on Windows too.
| When I alt-tab, I frequently end up in the notification
| window.
|
| 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.
| johnwalkr wrote:
| 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.
| bouke wrote:
| 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.
| MaanuAir wrote:
| If you're on a 2nd space in macOS, typing CMD-TAB to
| switch to the Teams window in 1st space will NOT display
| Teams and will keep you in 2nd space.
|
| Breaking the native CMD-TAB shortcut is breathtaking...
|
| (Workaround: switch to any other app in 1st space first,
| then switch to Teams...)
| dkdbejwi383 wrote:
| It makes me wonder how they manage to get it so wrong. Is
| there nobody at Microsoft who uses teams that they can
| ask for UX feedback? Does all the user feedback they
| collect go straight to the bin?
| r00fus wrote:
| It's a competition among the sub-groups to see who can
| inflict the most damage...
| Ashanmaril wrote:
| 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.
| heythere22 wrote:
| You would think its better on windows, but it's not. The
| notifications ignore the global notification settings and
| pop up even when you only allow notifications with
| priority. And they are using their own implementation as
| well
| OGWhales wrote:
| I see there is a setting in teams for using windows'
| notification vs using teams' notifications. I haven't
| tried it, so it probably doesn't actually work, but I
| figured I'd point it out.
| cygned wrote:
| They also get lost when you're in fullscreen. If I wouldn't
| get them on my watch, I'd basically be unreachable on
| Teams.
| faebi wrote:
| Exactly. I have one screen and I am nearly always working
| in full screen. My mac is often muted at the same time.
| Like that I am able to miss many calls because MS Teams
| shows the notifications on a space which I am not using.
| This would be no issue if they used system notifications.
| HelixEndeavor wrote:
| 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)
| mvolfik wrote:
| overall I agree, but tbh I'm quite happy for Telegram
| Desktop having its own notifications - the system ones in
| my Ubuntu Gnome (went through a few LTS upgrades, but not
| heavily customized) are really messed up, especially when
| Firefox sends something
| greggman3 wrote:
| AFAIK, every native app can subscribe and read all
| notifications, at least on Windows. So, sending
| notifications to the OS is a huge privacy issue.
| hackthememes wrote:
| 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.
| ygra wrote:
| Some software also presents that in the settings as the
| choice between "native notifications, which don't have as
| many features" and "custom notifications, which have all
| bells and whistles". And the default of course is the one
| with more features, not the one that respects your
| settings. I think Mattermost was where I've seen that
| distinction.
| joshuaissac wrote:
| 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.
| stefan_ wrote:
| This is what happens in an Electron world. Lots of
| experts around to make some JS+CSS notification boxes
| because they keep reinventing those for every SPA anyway,
| but.. integrate with the native system notifications?
| They don't even know how Electron works so how would they
| begin to do any of that.
| srfvtgb wrote:
| My company was a fairly early adopter of Teams. I remember
| there being a user feedback forum that was such an optimistic
| place. Fixing notifications was one of the highest voted
| issues and the MS rep promised work was being done on it, but
| it never got fixed before we finally accepted the increased
| cost and moved to Slack.
| vxNsr wrote:
| If it makes you feel any better they use their own custom
| notifications in windows as well and it suffers all the same
| issues (doesn't respect dnd, gets covered by/covers native
| notifications, etc)
| manmal wrote:
| Also, please make an M1-native version ASAP. Teams is my
| second worst app when it comes to memory pressure.
| deergomoo wrote:
| I don't think an M1 version would make much difference.
| It's just a horrifically bloated, sluggish garbage fire.
|
| VS Code and Teams are at complete opposite ends of the
| spectrum for what an Electron app can be.
| manmal wrote:
| Fair enough.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Careful, they'll give the VLC developers ideas!
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| The worst that actually existed as a shipping product was
| probably the QuickTime player that had a skeuomorphic thumb-
| wheel:
|
| http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm
| kergonath wrote:
| What an abomination this UI was... 14 years-old me thought that
| brushed metal was quite cool, though.
| polytely wrote:
| At my school (where I studied design) there were these big
| screens that we used for presentations (I think it was LG?) that
| had an absolutely terrible gesture control below the lower bezel,
| the idea being that you would move your hand through the air
| below the tv to scroll through menu's, it didn't work at all, and
| the TV was almost impossible to control.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The worst one I've seen in actual practice was that of the
| Openmoko Neo Freerunner, which I saw at a mobile industry
| tradeshow years ago. The guy, and I must stress this the type of
| nerd who thought Openmoko was pretty good, had to open up a
| teensy little xterm and run alsamixer before making a call. So
| bad.
| leephillips wrote:
| That's awesome in its own way.
| kristopolous wrote:
| I'm on the other end. I use a cheap midi device to do volume
| control via knobs and a slider. I've been trying to explore other
| modalities:
|
| https://youtu.be/rdlAZfH9Uhk
|
| 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.micwi
| l.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.
| lanewinfield wrote:
| I once was tasked with creating a version of this as an interview
| assignment for a job at Apple. Definitely one of the more fun
| interview tasks I've had.
| rendall wrote:
| To read any of the other articles, you have to sign in and give
| up your data, open yourself up to spam. It's honestly terrible UX
| schemescape wrote:
| Let's also not forget horrible microphone volume controls, e.g.
| where you crank it all the way up to "100%" and people can still
| barely hear you unless you yell directly into the little
| microphone hole.
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| I have the same issue with mine. I stopped used that specific
| mic and have used WOMic android app ever since, turning my
| phone into wifi microphone. The phone microphone is suprisingly
| good quality and picks voice nicely even from distance. Paired
| with nVidia Broadcast to denoise the sound it became my daily
| driver.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| What is the problem with the iOS one?
| starchild_3001 wrote:
| 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).
| Hamuko wrote:
| You do know you can just drag the volume icon from the control
| center back to the menu bar, right?
|
| 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.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| How is _anyone_ supposed to work out that you can drag a
| volume icon from the control center to the menu bar?
|
| It's nice that you can. But as clear affordances go, that
| really isn't one.
| Hamuko wrote:
| You can also go to System Preferences > Dock & Menu Bar >
| Sound > Show in Menu Bar.
| knolan wrote:
| I don't mind the Touch Bar volume control, you just don't
| lift your finger and drag the icon. Same for screen
| brightness.
|
| My only gripe is that my 16" MBP gets so hot using the touch
| bar burns my finger.
| abram wrote:
| 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 'Turn down the volume.'" -- https://support.apple.com/en-
| us/HT212203
| [deleted]
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Does seem odd they couldn't have squeezed another switch in
| there, or let you lower volume with the switch in one ear and
| raise it with the switch in the other ear.
| gumby wrote:
| Crying out for a slider interface like the unlamented Touch
| Bar. The stems are long enough for the gesture (not absolute
| positioning).
| cunthorpe wrote:
| Time to bring back the click wheel via earring or nipple
| accessory.
| gumby wrote:
| Brilliant. Address the problem by selling a dongle!
| [deleted]
| vxNsr wrote:
| Yea, I actually thought that's how they worked when I first
| got them, I remember seeing a demo where that was done, but
| it was probably either concept art or a different product.
| lxe wrote:
| "Please drink verification can" doesn't sound too far-fetched
| now, does it?
| nuker wrote:
| Powerbeats have physical rocker buttons
| gumby wrote:
| One of the teens in the house has discovered you can say "Hey
| Alexa shut the fuck up".
|
| I'm afraid the joyless Siri just ignores you when you say that.
| [deleted]
| schmorptron wrote:
| Ha, I've been doing the same thing with google assistant. Try
| it politely once, and then if it doesn't work or understand
| change to "shut the fuck up" and it somehow always gets it.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| I actually really like that feature - it works with any
| _strongly-worded_ "stop" command: Alexa detects user
| annoyance and swiftly stops whatever it's doing with the
| minimum of back-and-forth.
|
| 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.
| geoduck14 wrote:
| I would like the Alexa team to reward politeness.
|
| Like if you say "Alexa, please mute", you could unlock a new
| voice or a funny joke or something.
| yreg wrote:
| I believe Google assistant has some optional mode where it
| makes children say please.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Hey Geo shut the duck up
| gumby wrote:
| Creating a better world, albeit one spy-device at a time.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| We laugh, but in all seriousness, what evidence is there
| that Amazon is acting unethically with the Echo devices?
| gumby wrote:
| Counterevidence: some of them (perhaps all) have a
| hardware switch to mute the microphone, a requirement
| allegedly set by the CEO.
|
| 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.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| 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.
| matsemann wrote:
| But you still ended up buying them? I didn't know it's not
| possible, glad I went with Jabra Elite Active instead. Cannot
| imagine trying to muck around with that crap while out
| running.
| RandallBrown wrote:
| I did end up buying them.
|
| 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.
| geenew wrote:
| I discovered you can say 'hey Siri volume N' where N is the
| volume percentage. 70 usually works out for me for normal
| listening.
|
| Not that I disagree with your main point; I refuse to use Siri
| in public, like you say, it's humiliating.
| bredren wrote:
| This was the correct decision.
|
| 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.
| totetsu wrote:
| It's like how redbull reps tell the barkeep to only pour half
| the can In the drink and give you the can to hold and carry
| around. It makes you into a billboard for the product talking
| to Siri in public.
| prox wrote:
| Wow, that's on purpose?
| bserge wrote:
| Not as humiliating as on Android, so there's that.
| deregulateMed wrote:
| What makes one better or worse?
|
| 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."
| bserge wrote:
| Well, at least Apple's assistant has a name. "OK Google" is
| just directly praying to the overlord :D
| deregulateMed wrote:
| Can't you squeeze the sides or something? I don't use
| voice search much because I prefer accuracy. But when I
| do, I don't use "ok Google"
| aidenn0 wrote:
| worst real-life one I saw was shaped like a knob. You had to move
| the mouse in a circle to move the volume up and down. I don't
| recall what software now, I think it was some random MP3 player
| crapware that came preinstalled on a computer.
| keithnz wrote:
| yeah, this is the worse, even worse is if your mouse moves
| outside the circle of the knob it resets back to where ever it
| was, which I experienced on some random audio thing back in the
| 90s.
| donio wrote:
| The one with the 100 radio buttons at least allows precise
| control, something that most volume controls out there lack.
| topspin wrote:
| I've seen worse volume controls than everything offered here on
| several radio streaming sites.
| 13of40 wrote:
| I just ran into one of these. I just got a Garmin Fenix Pro 6
| watch, and it has a Spotify client on it. Just create a playlist
| on your phone or computer, then download and play it from your
| watch with Bluetooth. Sweet! Unfortunately it autoplays, seems to
| set the volume way too high by default, and while the volume
| control is a regular slider, it takes a minimum of four button
| presses across three different buttons around the perimeter of
| the watch to reduce it. So think "Crap that's loud-press up,
| press down, press enter, press down..." and all the while your
| eardrums are being blasted out. And god help you if you deviate
| from the sequence and have to back out to try again.
| kadoban wrote:
| Do your headphones have volume control? If you're not sure, you
| should check. It's likely much less painful than that sounds.
| 13of40 wrote:
| No, I have simple ones by design. I don't need my earbuds
| launching me into a cardio workout or a meditative breathing
| session if I touch them in the wrong spot. (Looking at you,
| Samsung.)
| kadoban wrote:
| Hah, fair enough. Ya I find volume adjust useful but
| everything else I can do without.
| glenngillen wrote:
| I have the Fenix 5 so by no means the same, but it also seems
| like a weird "feature" to change between versions. Are you sure
| this isn't your headphones? I reconnect at the same volume I
| left it at when I join.
|
| 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.
| Ice_cream_suit wrote:
| I nominate PulseAudio Volume Control 4.0 for the worst volume
| control that I have come across.
|
| Unfortunately I have to use it almost daily.
| twic wrote:
| I think the worst volume UI is the one on the Ubuntu machine i'm
| using right now. It's exactly like the volume UI on every other
| Linux desktop you've used, except that it doesn't actually change
| the volume.
|
| 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.
| tzs wrote:
| Oh my. I actually used something kind of like the third one
| (array of buttons for each volume level).
|
| 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
| KONAir wrote:
| To be honest I would use tickbox or text input ones. Also I am
| fairly certain without constant earbud volume level warnings I'd
| be deaf in a week.
| FroshKiller wrote:
| This started out entertaining, then I realized that there is no
| attribution for the designs, and even though there are several
| links that say things like "the original thread," they are all
| just links to search results for "volume" on the ProgrammerHumor
| subreddit.
| Sharlin wrote:
| It never was a single thread but a meme that lasted for a
| while, with people making lots of different top-level posts. So
| linking to search results is the best you can do.
| egypturnash wrote:
| You could... link to the particular post, instead of the
| search you found it in?
| Sharlin wrote:
| Good point :D
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| I am usually one to call out unattributed art, but in this case
| (IIRC) the ProgrammerHumor community is the source of this
| trend. You can confirm this by pasting the URL of any of these
| images to tineye.com and sorting by 'oldest' to check when the
| image first appeared online, eg:
|
| https://tineye.com/search/af9c3fe10f5da6775143aa30a421733c4f...
| seattle_spring wrote:
| Would attributing the posts to random Reddit names provide much
| value? If I knew the 3rd one was from /u/potato_up_my_rectum,
| it's not like I would go seek out his other art or work.
| FroshKiller wrote:
| The point of attribution is to give credit to the creators.
| It's an intrinsically valuable act. You might not go look at
| their other posts, but I might. And if I were one of the
| creators whose work was taken to add value to someone's blog
| post, I'd appreciate the courtesy.
| baalimago wrote:
| 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 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.
| hughrr wrote:
| Fuck me that's just stupid.
| andrepd wrote:
| It's actually mind-boggling just how bad UI/UX in general has
| become. Like, there are things which are bad because it's hard
| to get right, but this trend to me sinks even lower than that,
| it's actually spectacularly bad.
|
| 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.
| titzer wrote:
| I wish UI designers would stop re-inventing things for no
| reason.
| aasasd wrote:
| That's so hilariously misguided, it's like some student's
| experimental pet project. It gives zero visual hint as to how
| to use it (i.e. 'affordances'). From the looks, I'd guess that
| it's a horizontal slider with the range of like fifty pixels.
| If this was any kind of an established control, you'd surely
| just use the speaker icon itself as the 'handler' to grab--the
| fact that they needed the separate green dot says enough about
| whether it was a good idea. How it passed any kind of review at
| MS is a baffling mystery.
| Humdeee wrote:
| I actually thought the image hadn't loaded correctly when I
| first opened it. I would have no clue what to do with this
| the first time seeing it.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| pragmatic8 wrote:
| It's a plain bug expected of beta quality software.
|
| No need for any drama.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows11/comments/ogchx7/volume_ba...
| kazinator wrote:
| The thing is, nobody needs a beta quality volume control (or
| anything else) in a legacy desktop OS in 2021.
| morsch wrote:
| Looks like the volume slider has no minimum width and is
| compressed down to a single blip. When there are other
| widgets in the container, it expands to a usable width.
| Reasonable bug for beta software.
| dilap wrote:
| It's not all roses over in Mac land either, look how terrible
| this icon is for "External Headphones"
|
| https://pasteboard.co/Kb9u3OY.png
|
| Apple is slipping. (Probably an oversight because of Airpod-
| centric thinking.)
| aasasd wrote:
| My guess is that icons distinguish between local devices and
| Airplay stuff.
| dilap wrote:
| "External headphones" should be a _headphones_ icon, not a
| computer icon, is my complaint, to be explicit. It used to
| be correct in a previous version of macOS but regressed at
| some point.
| mabub24 wrote:
| 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.
| nathanm412 wrote:
| I wonder if it has something to do with your language. I know
| they've had other random UI issues if your language wasn't set
| to english. Here's my volume setting for reference:
| https://i.imgur.com/PwW0SwI.png
|
| 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.
| rige wrote:
| Hmm, where do you need two clicks to change the volume by
| scrolling? I can just click on the volume icon (or any of the
| three icons there, since they're all a big button), mouse
| over the volume slider, and scroll to change it. I think this
| is essentially the same flow as before.
| lsaferite wrote:
| It's humbling to realize I never knew the scroll wheel would
| adjust the volume slider once I'd clicked the speaker icon.
| aasasd wrote:
| The wheel does work when just hovering over many sliders,
| at least on Mac and in Firefox. However, whether that works
| in any particular app or a site is a gamble.
|
| 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.
| wutwutwutwut wrote:
| 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.
| hnbad wrote:
| 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.
| gambiting wrote:
| I've specifically went and downloaded the latest ISO of Windows
| 11 preview to see this monstrosity, but no, it seems like a
| completely normal slider to me, just like in Windows 10.
| arifmeticus wrote:
| Top talent on display. That's why these people earn hundreds of
| thousands per year, meritocracy at work.
| snarfy wrote:
| And I bet it still uses a linear rather than logarithmic scale.
| Can't even do audio right.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| please, tell me this is a joke! what's wrong with a good ol'
| slider? I honestly don't know what these people are thinking...
| DHowett wrote:
| _Huh._ For me, on build 22000.65, that's a normal full-sized
| slider.
|
| I'll file a bug just in case it's not already known.
| normac2 wrote:
| The Clippy one gave me physical shudders. Traumatic memories...
| scott-smith_us wrote:
| I used to work with a "GUI Expert" who designed everything like
| the 100-radio-button example, except that he didn't line anything
| up.
|
| 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...
| lucideer wrote:
| Tbh, I saw that example in the post and thought "that's ugly
| but extremely usable; I don't think that belongs here".
|
| 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".
| beezischillin wrote:
| The iPhone lovingly reducing the volume claiming to protect your
| hearing (a feature that seems impossible to disable even after
| changing the phone's region) as an added iOS 14 feature was a
| volume control "option" that I found annoying and insanely
| unsafe. I don't even think there was initially an option to
| disable it for specific outputs. The best part was at that stage
| when it kept nearly muting itself in my car while I was driving
| and had the windows down, taking my attention away from the road
| forcing me to fiddle with the volume up button. I know that it's
| possible to mark each individual output as "other" now but it's
| still kind of insane to force this on users.
| machello13 wrote:
| Which regions have this? I'm in the US and haven't seen it.
| beezischillin wrote:
| I'm in the EU (unsurprisingly). More specifically it's this
| feature: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT211903
|
| 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.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| The worst "volume experience" IMO is many (albeit cheap) laptops,
| with speakers that at maximum volume cannot produce sounds
| audible over the laptops own fan, or that can overcome someone
| whispering from a few meters away.
| ardit33 wrote:
| VW seems to have topped all of these suggestions. Their volume
| control in the latest car (ID 4, and latest Golf) is dumb as
| hell, and sheer dangerous.
|
| 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.
| G3rn0ti wrote:
| Have you ever tried buying a train ticket at one of the vending
| machines of the ,,Deutsche Bahn" while in a hurry to catch your
| train?
|
| https://youtu.be/TIz6rwIsVHo
| efrecon wrote:
| They ... abandoned knobs. I have a car from their previous
| generation and the whole UI can be controlled with knobs and
| button presses, in addition to touching the screen.
| dang wrote:
| One past related thread:
|
| _The worst volume control user interfaces (2017)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19407334 - March 2019 (19
| comments)
| bllguo wrote:
| speaking of volume.. every device I've ever used is obscenely
| loud. On my phone (with headphones) even just 1 increment on the
| volume is too much at times; on my windows PC I basically never
| go above 10/100. How are these things calibrated exactly
| parsecs wrote:
| It might be due to your headphones, if they're particularly low
| resistance.
| bllguo wrote:
| that's interesting, so it's related to the device. seems
| obvious in retrospect. still, I swap between 3 daily (bulky
| headphones, earphones, and wireless earbuds) and have the
| same complaint for all of them. just a coincidence?
| parsecs wrote:
| Probably not? When I use my headphones with my laptop, 10%
| system volume and 100% app volume is about comparable to
| 80% volume (ish) on my iPhone 6S.
|
| 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.
| moring wrote:
| If they are analog headphones, why can't the audio output
| measure the resistance and adjust the output signal
| accordingly?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Kind of an interesting question. Initially, I'd say, "That
| won't work because resistance doesn't tell you anything
| about the efficiency of the speaker elements in the
| headphones."
|
| 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.
| webwielder2 wrote:
| Apple won this back in 1999: https://i.imgur.com/V9WQ8Gc.png
| hnick wrote:
| Speaking of Apple, it is more than a little frustrating that if
| I start driving with Google Maps, and I realise it's too quiet,
| the volume control changes the Ringer instead of the media
| volume unless I time it to be while she is speaking. Which is
| kind of tough if it's really quiet, and hard to catch during
| shorter snippets anyway. I remember on Android when the app had
| focus it'd always change the media volume in these situations.
| I'm not sure which of them to blame!
| boomlinde wrote:
| Cleverness over predictability. Instead of removing or even
| hiding complexity they obfuscate it. It seems like a
| consistent theme with Apple's designs.
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Still think changing the volume from just being one setting
| and hard mute switch to the granular ringer/volume and
| context based approach was a mistake.
|
| 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.
| quicklime wrote:
| Yep, I came here to mention the QuickTime volume control wheel,
| which was strangely missing from the article. Skeuomorphism
| gone mad.
|
| http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm
| bashinator wrote:
| Oooh, so that's where the allergy to skeuomorphism comes from.
| einr wrote:
| The extra funny bit is that the type of physical volume control
| it's imitating is bad even in the real world. I remember having
| these dinky little wheels on Walkmans and such and having to
| fiddle a lot with them to get the exact volume I wanted.
| deaddodo wrote:
| Might be useful if you pointed out what you're referring to. I
| assume it's the little volume control on QuickTime player?
| icedchai wrote:
| It took me more than a few seconds to even find the control.
| I guess that's why it's so bad!
| Sebb767 wrote:
| To be honest, without reading the comments I actually would
| not have realized that there's a volume control visible on
| this screen.
| perryizgr8 wrote:
| Yes, it was extremely difficult to adjust accurately.
| runawaybottle wrote:
| The insanity of the false intuitiveness is hilarious. So
| let me get this straight, you need pixel perfect accuracy
| to reduce the volume to lowest, but not as much to increase
| it to the highest? How was this delineation determined?
| mattowen_uk wrote:
| Dear Microsoft: When I change the volume in Windows _whilst
| something is playing audio_ , please DON'T issue an annoying
| 'bong!' sound.
| jmspring wrote:
| You mean modern iPhones?
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| I actually love the advanced volume control one with all the
| numbers.
| chapium wrote:
| I think it could be improved, but 2d space being is pretty
| genius here. Rows for major changes, and columns for minor
| adjustments. Still overly engineered for something that can be
| just a single slider.
| JohnJamesRambo wrote:
| But the slider is usually so small! At best we are talking 10
| steps of volume accuracy with a mouse (probably more like 5)
| and it is never reproducible. With the big boy I can hit 67
| or whatever my favorite volume is every time.
| Nition wrote:
| It'd certainly save pedantically trying to move the mouse one
| pixel to select 50 instead of 51.
| teknopaul wrote:
| Apple's volume control is laughable. That stupid blipping noise
| for "feedback" as if you couldn't hear the sounds that is already
| playing. Naturally the bip is at a squarker bursting volume
| because all the hip kids listem to music compressed into oblivion
| and a bit of spare dynamic range is not something any Apple
| customer will ever understand. I am sure many fanbois bemoan the
| fact that their hi-fi does not have the exact same apple blessed
| bip, it will not be long before DJs pump up the volume with
| accompanying bips.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| That "blip" is to give you feedback when sound isn't actually
| playing. And, you can turn it off if you want to (System
| Preferences > Sound > Sound Effects > Play feedback when volume
| is changed). I leave mine turned off; holding down Shift
| temporarily re-enables it.
| qlm wrote:
| I haven't heard that blip in years. Is it still around?
|
| Edit: I see you can enable it, does it default to off on the
| touchbar Macbooks?
| andyxor wrote:
| Sonos volume control on their speakers is a contender, their
| entire app can be used as an illustration of bad UX
| titzer wrote:
| 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 feedback that you have clicked
| anything active) and then _drag up and down_. Not side-to-side or
| in a circle, _up and down_.
|
| I'm sorry to whoever designed this control for this very useful
| Free OSS. But goddamn that is bad.
| boondaburrah wrote:
| dragging UI knobs up and down (like a slider) is the standard
| though and anything that makes me drag it in a circle is
| infuriating because of how hard to control it is.
|
| 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.
| sellyme wrote:
| I'm not usually a fan of capital punishment, but whoever said
| "no, it needs to look like a real instrument knob" is on track
| to change my stance there.
| lights0123 wrote:
| 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_.
| throwdbaaway wrote:
| Back in the kde 3 days, there was this applet called "knob"
| for volume control. For me personally, its circular knob UI
| is actually the best.
|
| 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/
| liketochill wrote:
| And for those of us on laptops with no mousewheel abs no
| middle button? Trying to make the mouse move in an arc ...
|
| Knobs are great in the physical world, never met one on a
| screen that wasn't hard to use.
| ioseph wrote:
| It comes down to space, a knob can represent more points than
| a slider for less screen space
| goodpoint wrote:
| Moving a round volume control in a circle would be even worse.
| Ashanmaril wrote:
| 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.
| leduyquang753 wrote:
| That's commonplace in audio production programs/plugins
| actually.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| It's to replicate audio disks - missing the opportunity that
| a different interface requires different interaction
| mechanisms.
| einr wrote:
| It is, and it kind of sucks. Worse yet: in different VST
| plugins, for instance, sometimes you're supposed to click the
| knob and drag up and down, sometimes you're supposed to move
| the mouse in a circle as if you were rotating the knob.
| beardyw wrote:
| Yep,every VST seems to be a learning exercise. But the
| variety of layouts and colours can also be inspiring. That
| said, the most garish were rarely keepers.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| 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 UIs.
|
| Some designs, like Korg's MS20 VST, had all of the above.
| goodpoint wrote:
| 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.
| morsch wrote:
| Humans may be terrible at reading pie charts quickly, but
| I think we do fine with visualizations such as clocks,
| gauges and circular controls. I wouldn't even be
| surprised if a circular gauge can be read more quickly or
| with less attention than a linear one (size/area being
| equal).
| goodpoint wrote:
| When staring at a mixer with 60 or more knobs you can see
| the difference in reading speed very 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)
| WhompingWindows wrote:
| If it's FOSS maybe you can make a feature request to the
| creator?
| alex_young wrote:
| 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.
| function_seven wrote:
| 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/
| bouke wrote:
| On iOS I've configured the buttons to always change media
| sound, not the ringer because of this.
| [deleted]
| function_seven wrote:
| Never fails. I complain about something, and it turns out
| there's an option that'll handle it.
|
| Thanks. I just did the same. Not sure why I didn't see that
| before.
| bbarn wrote:
| Here's a problem I didn't realize existed since my iPhones
| have been on vibrate for the last ten years.
| bouke wrote:
| For me the issue with Silent Mode is that it keeps
| getting integrated into other apps. So when silent,
| Photos mutes audio in video and live photos for example.
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| All/most CarPlay enabled cars do exactly the same thing. The
| navigation and music volume controls are treated separately but
| there's usually only one physical control.
| disillusioned wrote:
| This sort of context-aware volume control is fairly common
| though, right? If you adjust the volume while you're on a call,
| it's adjusting the phone volume. If you adjust the volume with
| the door open, you're adjusting the door-open volume, but it'll
| persist to when the door is shut (so, regular media volume) for
| the duration, which isn't the worst case.
|
| 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.
| 404mm wrote:
| Boo, my contribution didn't make it to the gallery.
|
| 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.
| cushychicken wrote:
| OMG I lost it at the resistor color band selection version XD
| temp8964 wrote:
| The worst volume control in the real world is Bluetooth on cars.
| Somehow every time I connect to my car the volume gets lower. Now
| I have to turn it up to the max to hear a little bit. I have
| tried all the methods on internet with no success.
| judge2020 wrote:
| What car?
|
| 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.
| deaddodo wrote:
| Bluetooth as a standard has the audio device tell the master
| device what volume it is set at. For whatever reason, devices
| are almost universally terrible at managing this.
|
| 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.
| itslennysfault wrote:
| Runner up is the touch bar on MacBook Pro. I really miss the
| simple volume up/down buttons.
| tedd4u wrote:
| Yes the touchbar slider is heinously bad. If my memory serves,
| you have to first tap one area to get a slider to appear and
| then slide that. <facepalm>
|
| 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.
| Groxx wrote:
| As a hater of hidden UI like Apple has been obsessed with for
| several years (force touch, most of the touchbar, edge
| swiping (as convenient as it can be sometimes), etc): there
| is a way, but why would you ever try it:
|
| 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.
| vultour wrote:
| You can also quickly swipe over the volume button in either
| direction to increase/decrease the volume, works for
| brightness as well.
|
| 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.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| Honestly the way the touchbar handles volume is about the only
| thing I like about it. It's also literally the only thing I use
| on it besides the software "ESC" button.
| AppleCandy wrote:
| Yes, I totally agree. I much prefer touchbar volume slider to
| physical keys, because you get near-instant granular level
| selection over large range as opposed to multiple key presses
| required with courser increments to move to a certain level.
|
| 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?
| snug wrote:
| I think it works great, press and slide left or right (no need
| to lift your finger if that's what you're referring to)
| gwbas1c wrote:
| In the mid 1990s, Aerosmith released their Cloud 9 CD with
| enhanced content for windows when placed in a CDROM drive.
|
| 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.)
| wil421 wrote:
| Oh man I haven't thought about those CDs that had extra content
| for computers. I had the volume issue and hated with a passion
| the weird players it would install.
| AceJohnny2 wrote:
| Obligatory Google Wave scrollbar mention...
|
| http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/11/15/google_waves_scroll...
|
| (Damn, it's already been over a decade already since it ended?)
| addicted wrote:
| These aren't good scrollbars, but it's clear that they were
| trying to solve certain problems.
|
| 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.
| rectang wrote:
| 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.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| On every iPad I've seen, only the lower 3-4 (of 16) steps are
| normal indoor range. Even the 1st step is too loud at night. I
| need half-steps.
|
| Is this due to linear vs logarithmic scaling? Or are people
| throwing wild parties where the iPad needs to fill a room with
| sound?
| shinymark wrote:
| I agree - when trying to watch something next to a sleeping
| partner even 1 step above muted is too loud. Annoying. I
| often watch Netflix muted and read subtitles because of this.
| I guess I need headphones.
|
| But I do really think a volume one half of the current lowest
| would be useful for me.
| mvolfik wrote:
| Headphones really are the solution. I used to have wired
| ones and these were quite uncomfortable to handle - cable
| messed up all the time, and even when you untangle them you
| have to avoid pulling it, so I used speaker most of the
| time anyway. I finally bought wireless buds a year ago and
| I really understood why so many people have these and talk
| about it - it's just too easy
| mike_pol wrote:
| You can go to the control centre or whatever it's called when
| you pull down from the battery side of the screen and tap and
| hold the volume widget, you can then drag your finger up/down
| to change the volume in small increments. I have the same
| issue as you when I'm listening to stuff at night.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| > 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.
| onion2k wrote:
| 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.
| kaba0 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| > 99.9% of volume controls scale the output linearly.
|
| 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.
|
| [1]: https://irzyxa.blogspot.com/p/downloads.html
| javajosh wrote:
| You've given me an idea for a volume control - enter a
| function like x^2 or x^3, which is graphed (on a linear
| scale). Then pick an x. The y value will be your volume. (The
| component should reverse any platform specific non-linearity
| first.)
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| How would you compute the current volume level? You would
| have to either store the current x value (which could
| desync if you change the volume level using the OS volume
| control), or derive the nearest x from the current y value
| (which may be possible on PulseAudio, but I haven't checked
| if you're stuck to the nearest 1% or if you can get a more
| precise or dB level).
| javajosh wrote:
| Well if the function you put in is continuous, single-
| valued , then you can invert it and compute x(y). At the
| end of the day if the volume is represented as a syscall
| with a float between 0 and 1 you can play arbitrary games
| with any bijective function to make setting that number
| arbitrarily complicated.
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| Pretty sure Android's volume control isn't linear either. At
| least perceptively I find the steps relatively even (which
| implies it's not linear).
| nyanpasu64 wrote:
| When probing my Android phone's output in an oscilloscope,
| I also saw that it was not linear, and the volume increased
| more per level when louder. However I have not attempted to
| compute the exact curve. And I suspect it also differs
| between different versions of Android or different phones
| (my Android 11 phones has more volume levels than older
| phones), or with different audio APIs (some phones use
| tinyalsa, some use XML files to configure hardware volume
| gain, some don't).
| jiggawatts wrote:
| This is in the same category of error as most programmers
| thinking that sRGB uses a linear light model. They try to do
| arithmetic like blending or blurring on the raw image data this
| inevitably does the wrong thing.
|
| 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.
| prox wrote:
| I think Elite Dangerous Odyssey recently had this problem.
| Any ice planet at release was literally blowing out the sun
| in terms of brightness a thousand fold or so it seemed.
| rebuilder wrote:
| I thought Blender did convert to the sRGB gamma properly, the
| problem without "filmic" is that the highlights clip so badly
| without a roll off that lighting becomes very difficult and
| encourages bad workarounds.
| Akronymus wrote:
| >This is in the same category of error as most programmers
| thinking that sRGB uses a linear light model. They try to do
| arithmetic like blending or blurring on the raw image data
| this inevitably does the wrong thing.
|
| Relevant: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKnqECcg6Gw
| GuB-42 wrote:
| I think more people are aware of gamma correction now.
|
| 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
| mfost wrote:
| This doesn't work for alpha blending since even if you
| output the color in the right space, the GPU might do
| blending in sRGB space and mess things up.
|
| Best is to properly declare the target framebuffer as sRGB
| (if it is) and output linear colors while letting the GPU
| deal with it.
| garaetjjte wrote:
| For OpenGL, it will perform conversions automatically when
| sampling from texture with SRGB type, and opposite when
| writing to SRGB rendertarget (on desktop
| GL_FRAMEBUFFER_SRGB also needs to be enabled). I guess
| other APIs have similiar features.
| fomine3 wrote:
| Could you provide good documentation about such thing?
| boustrophedon wrote:
| There was a great post about gamma and sRGB from 2016 on HN
| a couple weeks ago[0] with some discussion[1]
|
| [0] http://blog.johnnovak.net/2016/09/21/what-every-coder-
| should... [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27721094
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| The classic video for this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKnqECcg6Gw
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I really liked this article:
| https://bottosson.github.io/posts/oklab/
|
| 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...
| gabesk wrote:
| Charles Poynton has good references on this. His website is
| very 90s, but his books (a la Digital Video and HD) are the
| best clearly explained introduction to color science and
| gamma vs linear light coding that I've ever read.
|
| https://www.poynton.ca/Poynton-color.html
| [deleted]
| christophilus wrote:
| Same for brightness control, at least on my Linux computers. I
| vaguely remember it feeling right when I used a Mac.
| mananaysiempre wrote:
| It's weird how I nominally know this but never really thought
| about the implications... How does the _hardware_ world do it?
| I'd expect the normal way to make a volume control would be to
| have an adjustable-gain amplifier using the standard opamp
| circuit somewhere, but those aren't logarithmic in any
| resistance you could wire to a knob, are they? (Yes, I am
| deeply ignorant about electronics.)
| bigiain wrote:
| Logarithmic potentiometers.
|
| https://learnabout-
| electronics.org/Resistors/resistors_09a.p...
| dbcurtis wrote:
| Probably at least as far back as WW II we had linear taper
| pots and audio taper pots. Bam. Done.
| jeffbee wrote:
| A lot of digital audio applications just do programmable gain
| in the digital domain. My main rig extends samples to 42 bits
| and attenuates in the digital domain, then dithers to 32 bits
| for the analog conversion.
| PeterisP wrote:
| It's exactly as you sugggest/doubt - in audio hardware you
| use potentiometers (the thing under the knob that has
| different resistance depending on the rotation) that are
| designed to have logarithmic scale.
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| I used to own a BlackBerry 10 phone running BB10 OS. At the
| time, the dev team accepted suggestions on how to make the OS
| better, and I suggested they make the volume controls
| logarithmic instead of linear, and they did! I loved how quiet
| that phone would go while still remaining clear--I used to
| listen to audiobooks as I fell asleep at night, and rather than
| use headphones I would just set the volume to level 1 or 2 and
| put it on my pillow beside my ear. I haven't been able to do
| that with any other phone since because the volume doesn't go
| low enough, or if it does the audio is muddy.
| na85 wrote:
| 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.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I still use my BB Classic as a daily driver. Really not
| looking forward to next April when 3G is switched off in
| Australia...
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| The Classic supports 4G, you know.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| I know, mate. But no VoLTE. You still need 3g for voice.
| amelius wrote:
| Just give me a nice round retro potentionmeter-style knob on my
| keyboard.
| temporallobe wrote:
| 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.
| RubberbandSoul wrote:
| 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 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.
| kaba0 wrote:
| I believe Ford automatically lowers the volume to barely
| hearable while in reverse -- since otherwise I think passing
| over the UI to a more important component is a good decision.
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| Does the power button work, or is it also locked out?
| RubberbandSoul wrote:
| I just checked. The power button is locked out but the
| volume knob works now.
|
| Now I feel stupid, but it's quite possible that it has been
| patched during a yearly service.
| thehappypm wrote:
| 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?
| unbalancedevh wrote:
| No, I agree that it's awful. I rarely want the volume when
| I get in and start the car to be the same as it was when I
| ended my last trip. And not "fiddling with the UI" is
| exactly why there should be a mechanical potentiometer knob
| that is always available by feel to let me quickly spin
| down the volume and get back to driving without being
| distracted or annoyed by the radio. The need for that in
| Reverse isn't any different than in Drive.
| heywire wrote:
| Mazda got this right on the CX5 (at least in my 2016). Not only
| is there a knob, but it is on the center console where you can
| easily reach it without looking. Same goes with the controls
| (the touch screen is disabled when the vehicle is moving)
| temporallobe wrote:
| My 2016 MX-5 (Miata) has the same thing, and it's one of the
| many reasons why as soon as I sat in the car, I immediately
| fell in love with it. Mazda seems to investment a lot in
| ergonomics and driver enjoyment. Case in point: the new Mazda
| 3 2.5 Turbo.
| barryvan wrote:
| Mazda got this right more recently by completely ditching
| touchscreens in favour of physical knobs and buttons. They've
| even been able to move the screen further away so that it's
| at a more comfortable focal distance -- less time for your
| eyes to adjust when you flick over from the road to the
| screen.
| durnygbur wrote:
| The digital clock in my car audio is half of the year correct
| and half of the year one hour off, except after replacing
| battery when it's a random number. The winner are kitchen
| devices with digital clocks. Recently visited house with high-
| end kitchen with build in coffee machine, dishwasher,
| fridge(s), oven, stove - half a dozen digital clocks, every
| showing different time, all wrong. Satan himself knows and
| cares what combination of buttons hidden God knows where
| adjusts these clocks.
| unbalancedevh wrote:
| > If your car's audio system doesn't have a simple knob you can
| grab and twist, well, that just sucks.
|
| 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.
| morsch wrote:
| I dunno, I kind of like having a second volume control at the
| wheel, which isn't easily compatible with having a physical
| potentiometer. Just make it a digital control that you can
| spin quickly (also let me push it for instant mute).
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| 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.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| What about the passengers? :-)
| ant6n wrote:
| Passengers would just reduce the carbon footprint per
| transported person, which goes against the greenwashing
| stance of Musk cars.
|
| Or put another way: those potential passengers should get
| their own Tesla, because more teslas are better for the
| environment.
| Hamuko wrote:
| They'll listen and they'll like it.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| A passenger using a touchscreen doesn't normally cause
| distracted driving.
| axiosgunnar wrote:
| Ah yes that is a very good point!
| xwdv wrote:
| The new Lamborghini Huracan Evo is especially bad at this with
| its touch screen volume control, no knobs at all.
| vincentmarle wrote:
| Alright will not be getting the Lambo then..
| FriedPickles wrote:
| Ford moved volume control to the touchscreen, but people wanted
| a knob. Solution? They stuck a knob to the touchscreen. Under
| the knob is an artificial "finger" that touches the screen.
|
| 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-...
| ajsnigrutin wrote:
| They took a simple device, that was easy to make, and every
| china basement factory could make, and made it needlessly
| complicated.
|
| 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+
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| Still unfortunately more expensive buying the component
| than just putting the dial on a touchscreen.
|
| Even if it's objectively worse in absolutely every possible
| dimension you could ever grade it on.
| potamic wrote:
| That is so ingenious, it's hilarious. I can imagine the
| collective cringe of all designers.
| HelixEndeavor wrote:
| It looks cool, and that's the only nice thing you can
| possibly say about it.
| sellyme wrote:
| It's a work of genius, that's just not necessarily a
| compliment.
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Tesla's have great physical controls for the stereo under
| your left thumb. For all the complaints about the Tesla
| touchscreen, the Model 3 has really well thought-out physical
| controls.
| anonymfus wrote:
| This reminds me how on some home audio systems when you
| change volume using buttons on remote control, a servo motor
| turns knob of the potentiometer.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I can twist mine as much as I like, but the radio comes on
| instantly and the software that cares about the volume knob
| being twisted starts about 3 seconds later.
| mark-r wrote:
| I have a Toyota Camry and I haven't timed it but I think it's
| more like 10 seconds. Before that neither the volume knob nor
| the on-off button work.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I had one that would work, but only if you rotated the knob
| _very slowly_. So if you turned the car on and the music was
| deafening, you had to oh-so-slowly turn down the volume with
| one hand, while trying to staunch the bleeding from your ears
| with the other hand.
| dmitshur wrote:
| While an awful situation, I couldn't help but laugh very
| much at how ridiculous it is. Thanks for this comment.
| mmoskal wrote:
| The rotary encoders typically require quite fast sampling
| (~1000Hz) to be reliable when turning fast (it can be also
| done in hardware though). They are probably running a whole
| RTOS on that poor microcontroller that controls radio, so
| can't afford so much processing power ;)
| TchoBeer wrote:
| That's hilariously bad design
| mikewarot wrote:
| In our Subaru, the radio comes on, but you can't turn it off
| for at least 10 seconds, and then it might come back on,
| depending on exactly how many times, and when, you tried to
| turn it off earlier.
| banana_giraffe wrote:
| My personal favorite is the Mac OS volume widget on the volume
| status icon drop down. It somehow changes for two finger drag on
| the touchpad, but ignores the scroll wheel.
|
| Well done Apple.
| lightbulbjim wrote:
| It used to move with the scroll wheel. Starting with Big Sur it
| no longer does. No idea who thought that was a good idea.
| mjcohen wrote:
| I had never tried that (Yosemite). The scroll wheel works just
| fine.
|
| On my 2014 Mac Mini, the Apple remote works fine for pausing,
| adjusting volume, and going into sleep mode with a long pause
| press.
| nojs wrote:
| These are all jokes except the iPhone randomly included which is
| real. Am I missing something?
| [deleted]
| snarfy wrote:
| There is a pic with Clippy - "It looks like the music is loud.
| Would you like me to turn it down?"
|
| 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.
| sjcsjc wrote:
| The best bit is that the yes button is disabled.
| jsemrau wrote:
| The Rick Astley one resonated with me. I recently moved countries
| and now a lot of websites I frequent switched automatically to
| the new country; which is really annoying.
| datavirtue wrote:
| The resistor control is pure gold.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| And pure black, brown, red, orange, ...
| cm2187 wrote:
| The volume control in VLC deserves a place somewhere in this
| list. It works fine if you click on it. But if you use the
| keyboard's up/down arrow keys, it seems to severely rate limit
| how fast you can increase or decrease sound. Not great when you
| need to stop a big bang from waking up your neighbors.
| bombela wrote:
| It also can go above 100%. And it seems that I can never get it
| back to 100% if I move it by mistake. Even using the keyboard
| it will never comes back to exactly 100%. Maybe 103%, or 98%.
| It drives me crazy.
| sellyme wrote:
| > And it seems that I can never get it back to 100% if I move
| it by mistake.
|
| Move it to 0%/200% by whatever means you'd like, then use
| keyboard increments to return it to 100%.
| MaxikCZ wrote:
| I dont know why, but sometimes I have this exact issue of
| mousewheel able to increase it by a step only every second or
| so, and sometimes it works perfectly.
|
| 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
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > 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?
|
| > 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.
| enumjorge wrote:
| This article seems to be a regurgitation of a thread from Reddit.
| blamazon wrote:
| This case was a "thread storm" instead of a single thread. Each
| post was a different thread over days/weeks. Challenging to
| link.
|
| 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.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| Challenging to link indeed. The post is from 2017 and their
| link is to a search results page that shows unrelated stuff.
| Some from just a few days ago, it was kinda disappointing.
| ranvel wrote:
| In fairness, it's lightly curated, or perhaps just misses a
| bunch.
| disillusioned wrote:
| This line:
|
| >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.)
| iso1631 wrote:
| Spotify volume is bad. I use a traditional mouse with a
| traditional scroll where where scrolling down moves the scroll
| bar down which moves the viewpoint down.
|
| On say youtube, scrolling down on the volume control reduces the
| volume.
|
| On spotify (well the webplayer anyway), scrolling down
| _increases_ the volume.
| bborud wrote:
| Apple's volume control is pretty bad in macOS is pretty bad now.
| I didn't think they could mess up that corner of the UI, but they
| did.
| cunthorpe wrote:
| Indeed. Funny to see this article pop up now because I've been
| considering the purchase of a USB volume knob for this exact
| reason.
|
| 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.
| roland35 wrote:
| The subreddit /r/Programmerhumor sometimes had a whole bunch of
| memes around volume controls, but there are often times other
| funny themes that can go on for weeks...
|
| - 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_...
| mgdlbp wrote:
| There's an entire subreddit for bad UI:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/badUIbattles/top/?t=all
| omnicognate wrote:
| Shame that community isn't hosted somewhere with a better UI.
| nayuki wrote:
| I like the volume control with imaginary numbers: https://www
| .reddit.com/r/badUIbattles/comments/ey74ya/volume...
| WalterGR wrote:
| > bad phone number inputs
|
| 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...
|
| https://imgur.com/a/4f3XB
|
| 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
| fleddr wrote:
| 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 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.
| spacechild1 wrote:
| > So if the value is 0, it means volume is at full output.
|
| 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 :-)
| kortex wrote:
| 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_! "
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| I've read like 3 explanations of why dB ratings are the way
| they are over the years and I still don't get it. Personally
| I think this is one instance where having a 0-100 linear
| scale is good UX for volume.
| ajklsdhfniuwehf wrote:
| 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.
| devinplatt wrote:
| Which pairs great with autoplay videos in text based news
| articles you made the unfortunate choice to read on your phone
| in a quiet public place.
| jimmySixDOF wrote:
| add to that a Bluetooth complication where vendor X earphone
| volume increments don't match the mobile platform. On Android
| you need to enable a Developer Mode setting (Disable Absolute
| Volume) before you get back control. I don't think that scores
| well on UI design either!
| garaetjjte wrote:
| https://xkcd.com/1884/
| SN76477 wrote:
| 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.
| JohnWhigham wrote:
| 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.
| avel wrote:
| 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).
| raindropm wrote:
| Hell yeah. I have unreasonable amount of rage against that one
| haha
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| I've got an annoying thing - not sure if it's a bug, probably)
| where the media volume on my iphone maxes out. So there's a
| nonzero chance now of shitting myself when hitting the unmute
| buttons on autoplaying videos.
| howenterprisey wrote:
| Those never have enough increments for me. I'm always on the
| quietest end of the slider, and when I want to go quieter I
| always end up accidentally muting the sound. I have to resort
| to dragging the slider with my finger - I don't know what I
| would do without that ability.
| tgb wrote:
| On Android I installed an app that lets me scale the global
| volume for this. It's called "Precise Volume" and seems to
| work well. I wish I could tweak the "gamma" of the volume
| slider though: I want to make quiet side quieter without
| making the loud end quieter so that it works both with
| headphones and with other devices.
| LinAGKar wrote:
| But now they changed it so it always controls the media volume
| by default on Android.
| MrOxiMoron wrote:
| oxygenOs now by default always does media volume, you have to
| switch for ring tone volume. best change ever
| ajklsdhfniuwehf wrote:
| funny thing. This WAS the default on android 2. go figure.
|
| cyanogen always had this as an option.
| justshowpost wrote:
| Yep, millennial smartphone devs took that <<master volume is
| bad>> saying too serious.
| feross wrote:
| You can disable changing the ringer volume with the buttons.
| Then the volume buttons only ever control the media volume for
| apps, videos, etc. It's so much nicer.
|
| 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.
| ajklsdhfniuwehf wrote:
| depends on: android version. manufacturer customizations. and
| probably other things.
|
| 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.
| martin-adams wrote:
| The worst one I've experienced is quite simply the Mac. For some
| reason, the Siri volume is handled differently.
|
| 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.
| m3kw9 wrote:
| A (skeuomorphic) circular knob that needed your mouse to drag and
| rotate around is one.
| triggercut wrote:
| Is this podcast TOO LOUD? Or are your arms tired from holding
| your headphones a couple of inches from your ears at all times?
| Or would you just like to be able to mute ads like these that
| override your volume settings in your podcast app? Well, you can
| fix that, with a $2.97 monthly plan to volumeslider.com Listeners
| to this podcast use the promo code "STFU" for 22% off an annual
| subscription.
| activitypea wrote:
| 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?
| mmmmmbop wrote:
| I believe it's an attempt at a joke.
| bobbylarrybobby wrote:
| 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.
| kaba0 wrote:
| Can you even place as many elements there? Vertical scrolling
| would not really make sense since you get into/out of that
| "menu" with a vertical swipe.
| Zak wrote:
| 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.
| grawprog wrote:
| The worst is newer versions of android. You turn it up full,
| suddenly it's down to 3/4's full again and you have to
| acknowledge you want to turn it up, then turn it up again. If
| the headphones unplug, you gotta turn it up again.
|
| 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.
| Zak wrote:
| The first couple documented solutions for the volume warning
| on my new rooted Android phone didn't appear to have any
| effect.
|
| 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.
| grawprog wrote:
| As far as I know, the audio functionality gained by rooting
| is no longer possible in newer android versions.
|
| 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.
| moring wrote:
| > The volume warning is required by EU regulations
|
| 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.
| RubberbandSoul wrote:
| I sometimes wonder how much of a computer setup is actually
| legal from a regulatory perspective? I have tinnitus in one
| ear so I usually set the volume balance on a system to
| 40-60 to spare it.
|
| 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.
| einr wrote:
| My iPhone (SE 1st gen, so I still have a headphone jack...) is
| constantly nagging at me that my average headphone volume is
| too loud; the reality is that when I use the headphone output
| I'm nearly always in my car using its line input, which
| requires me to max out the volume on the phone to get
| reasonable volume out of the amp.
| Hamuko wrote:
| I have this cheap small Bluetooth speaker that's not very loud
| but it's fine enough to use in the bathroom when I'm showering
| and doing stuff. I just need to keep it at 100% to actually
| hear it properly. However, at some point Apple decided that
| this speaker was actually a pair of headphones and there's a
| "feature" in iOS that can't be disabled that automatically
| lowers your headphone volume from 100% to 50% if it thinks
| you've been listening to music too long for too loud. It
| doesn't actually know what volume the speaker is outputting and
| it will do it even if the Bluetooth speaker is in another room
| behind a closed door.
|
| 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.
| jandrese wrote:
| I have a USB speaker that apparently does some sort of volume
| mapping on the mixer level. Unfortunately my OS does the same
| thing and they get multiplied together, so the effect is
| volume level 0-97: complete silence. Level 98: loud. Level
| 99: deafening.
| standardUser wrote:
| The worst volume control is no volume control. I'm looking at you
| Zoom.
| Folkert wrote:
| How about making it a Firefox configuration setting?
| justshowpost wrote:
| > in the world
|
| 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.
| [deleted]
| ajuc wrote:
| There is still innovation required. For example I'd like mouse
| wheeling on the volume indicator in tray to change the volume on
| windows like it does in KDE on Linux.
| bullen wrote:
| They are nowhere close, the worst exists on modern TVs, the AI
| volume controller = you cannot change the volume but the TV
| automatically senses the noise level and adjusts the volume to
| what it thinks you want.
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