This is not a totally trivial problem. Just think of calendar alerts which should probably have their own volume level that is *not* under application control, but user control. Moreover, they should probably always play over the speaker, unless the phone is silenced.
I wrote an article that touches on some of these topics a few years ago: http://www.triodia.com/staff/michi/blog/Apple.pdf But, in general, I tend to agree. Fewer roles is probably better, in the interest of user sanity. Cheers, Michi. On 21 Sep 2015, at 18:30 , Michael Zanetti <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi list, > > I'd like to discuss a topic which, as a daily user of the phone drives > me a bit bad and makes me lose countless phone calls: Volume controls. > > If you go through launchpad bugs, you'll find lots of bugs related to > volume control [1][2][3][4]. Let me summarize it up here: > > The biggest issue is that the volume buttons are completely > unpredictable. They control a different volume level each time you touch > them. For instance, play some game with a background music, press the > volume buttons. It will adjust the game's sound level (maybe, with a bit > of luck). Then start the game "Dinosaur" from the store and try again, > you'll notice that while playing this game the volume buttons don't > affect the sound made by the game any more but instead they'll leave the > game at 100% volume, while silencing your phone call ringtones. This is > the thing that makes me lose phone calls all the time. I play some game > with the phone, and when I'm done my ringtones are silenced without me > even knowing. > Another issue is that currently there's not really way to figure what > volume level your device is set to. The slider in the indicator is quite > meaningless, given it will fool you by displaying some value, but next > time a sound is produced it will jump to some different value before > playing the sound. This also creates the issue that there's no way to > control your sound level *before* you start a game, means you can't > really start a game on Ubuntu Touch in a place where you can't make > noise, because you have no chance to set the volume before it starts > playing. > > I've spent some time to figure where the issue is coming from and what a > solution could be. The main reason where this issue is coming from is > that we have a number of different audio roles that applications are > using. The volume buttons, as well as the slider in the indicators try > to be clever in knowing which role they should address whenever you > touch them. This, however, seems to reliably fail in 99% of the cases > you want to use it. > > So here's my proposal: > > * Let's drop all the audio roles we have except for ringtone (alert) and > multimedia. We don't need more of them, it'll make things unnecessarily > complex. > > * Make the hardware buttons always control the multimedia volume, that > is, game sounds, music player etc but don't ever touch ringtone volume > with them. > > * Make the volume slider in the indicator always control the multimedia > volume, never touch the ringtone volume. > > * Apps should always use the multimedia role, regardless of what they do > (unless thy deal with actual calls or incoming messages). > > * Add a second "slider" to the indicators that controls ringtone volume. > That slider could be a bit special tho, i.e. that it works more like a > profile selector. 0 is "vibrate only", 1 is "beep" and all the greater > values adjust volume of the ringtones. > > One thing I've not mentioned here yet are alarms. Alarms, again > could/should have their own role. But one never controls that role with > either the buttons or a slider. Instead, each alarm has his own volume > value assigned when the alarm is created, and an alarm is always played > at the volume its config says (except maybe only vibrate when the phone > profile is set to vibrate only - but those are small details we could > work out on the road). > > IMO this behaviour would make the volume way more predictable, > especially since one needs to use a slider in the indicators to change > the ringtone volume but at the same time giving the user visual feedback > on what the current volume is. > > What do you think? If you're working on anything related to this, please > help to get this issue fixed and improve the Ubuntu Phone experience. > > Br, > Michael > > > [1] https://bugs.launchpad.net/canonical-devices-system-image/+bug/1484463 > [2] https://bugs.launchpad.net/canonical-devices-system-image/+bug/1478506 > [3] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/indicator-sound/+bug/1478075 > [4] https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity8/+bug/1291458 > > -- > Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-phone > Post to : [email protected] > Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-phone > More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-phone Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-phone More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
