> Hardware already takes a positive approach -- keyboards and mouse > buttons are noisy, and deliberately so. > > Software has long taken a negative approach, mainly because its sound > abilities have been crappy, confined to loud and ugly beeps. In the
Negative sound effects are annoying. If you open Notepad and then open the file selector which is modal, you can't refocus Notepad's main window and Windows plays a very irritating beep. I think sound effects have a tendancy to amplify the action. So when you get annoyed about stupid modal dialogs you get even more annoyed when you hear a stupid beep. And being annoyed is not good. Emacs also makes a sound when you press Ctrl+G. I think it is good sometimes and bad other times. > It would be interesting to try a positive approach, but it would need > careful engineering to produce sounds that were subtle and reassuring. In Internet Explorer, when you click on a click it makes a nice clicking sound. I think that is a really nice example of a positive sound because that reassures you that you managed to click on something. It will be very fun trying out GTK:s new sounds whether they will be good or bad. -- mvh Björn _______________________________________________ Usability mailing list [email protected] http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/usability
