Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 3rd May 2010 22:04 UTC
Remember how Mark Shuttleworth justified moving the window titlebar widgets to the left by claiming the space freed up on the right side could now be used for something else? On his blog, Shuttleworth unveiled what, exactly, Ubuntu's plans are: window indicators, or 'windicators'. In a nutshell, it comes down to having a tray area in every window.
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Member since:2008-07-15
Ah, but doesn't the global volume mixer include support for each application, thus negating the need for the windicator?
It does, in a similar way as Vista. You pop up the sound preferences tab and adjust it there, it's not in the icon. Personally, I don't see anything wrong with that, but shuttleman seems to be going out on a limb to design something for the sake of designing it rather than its actual usefulness.
Member since:2009-02-19
Well, this particular use-case is one I hit frequently: the ability to adjust volume per-application with a little widget sitting right on the window title-bar is certainly alluring. It'd be a lot easier than going to the system's volume control every time you want to fiddle with relative volumes of your different applications. It also has the advantage of easy feature discovery -- as has been pointed out here before, a neat feature is useless if the user doesn't know it's there, and putting a per-app volume control widget right in the title bar lets the inexperienced user know fairly quickly that their system has the capability of per-application volume control.
Also, if the system makes per-app volume controls easy to find, it might also have the effect of sparing application developers the task of worrying about volume controls themselves.
Amusing note: Windows has this feature in theory, but, as often as not, whenever I try to use it, it fails in one of several ways. Either the volume settings are ignored, they cause the sound-generating application to crash, or, on rare occasion, they cause a crash in the Windows sound service, or even panic the kernel.
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Member since:
2005-07-11
Seriously, this is a stupid question: you've never wanted to adjust the volume your music plays at while still having all your other audio sources play at the same volume as before?
Ah, but doesn't the global volume mixer include support for each application, thus negating the need for the windicator?