Hacker News

I upvoted you - at least, I hope I did. HN's vote buttons have such poor UX that a) it's difficult to hit the right button b) it's impossible to know, after doing so, whether you even hit the right button!

This is an issue in many audio players. Maybe not as bad as in iOS (I don't know, can't compare), but the steps when the volume is low are nearly always too large. I like to play audio on low volumes, especially in quiet environments, and it seems designers/developers don't cater to that use case. One step is too low are even complete silent, one step louder is too loud.

It definitely deserves a place on the list.

In fact, it's the worst of the worst, since it's just plausible looking enough to be the only option on over a billion devices.

On top of that, the EU passed a bill to make them fix it, and they... didn't. If you have headphones that are too loud at 'unit above zero', and use the volume limiter in the device safety section to set it to a reasonable level, it just completely mutes the headphones.

This isn't a hardware issue. Bluetooth devices have an integer volume setting, and the "unit above zero" setting is definitely not '1' on iOS like it is on android.

I've hit this problem with 100% of the non-apple headphones I've used.

If you long press the volume bar in control center then it opens a larger version you can drag to adjust more precisely.

I experienced the same "muted, TOO LOUD" when I bought some very sensitive IEMs, but fortunately I have a rooted Android where I can customise the volume control curve, so I moved more of the steps down towards the lower end of the DAC range and made the loudest just a little beyond "threshold of pain".

That would be interesting to have the volume bars logarithmic instead of linear.

The focus ring on manual cinema camera lenses are like this where there is 270° or rotation from near to infinity giving a human plenty of room to move while AF lenses only have 90°. The distances are much smaller and harder to get smooth focus pulls and feels much more linear. So yeah, not the same, but similar-ish in that there's not enough action in the sweet spot and too much in extremes

The same with brightness. I have a shortcut to lower the white point because the lowest brightness level is still far to bright in complete darkness.

I face the same situation on Android, there is no way to play music really quiet on Sennheiser TW4. Isn't this also plugs manufacturer's fault? (not valid for apple obviously)

the difference between 0 and unit above 0 on iPhones is about 30% volume.

I have found that when playing audio to a HomePod, pressing Volume Up on the phone increases the volume by 1.

But if you immediately press Volume Down, it goes down by 0.5. So, with two button presses you can get the half-step increase you wanted in the first place.

It's like adding "a little" to a volume change command with Siri.

  "Siri, turn the volume up a little" turns the volume up 0.5.

  "Siri, turn the volume up" turns the volume up one.  

  "Siri, turn the volume up a lot" turns the volume up two.

I think the only place that Apple has done a good job with volume controls is the AirPods Max. But even there, I'd like more granularity at the low end.

That wasn't part of the show? The popup (no idea what was on it, no one reads those of course) shows up and you think 'Ah. Yes, that would be very annoying if that happened while interacting with a volume slider.'

Seriously, why not just link to the Reddit thread instead of this? It seems like every damn site has become a Torment Nexus.

It works fine with javascript blocked, thankfully.

That popup is typical of blogs hosted on Medium. I don't know if the author even has control over if it pops up or now.

Common in desktop software for controlling measurement gear like oscilloscopes. Those have actual knobs on the equipment, so the software does the same thing and it's the worst thing ever.

Yeah, your 1 option is actually worse than some of parody submissions. What makes it truly horrific is that it works just enough to get you to put your thumb into muscle spasms trying to do it.

And the silly thing is, as ridiculous as they are for mouse click/drag or touch use, those kind of dial controls are actually reasonable when coupled to a scroll wheel (like you can do in GNURadio). But Apple has never wavered from "one mouse button and nothing else is good enough for everybody," and scroll wheels aren't really an option for a touch interface.

Ah yes, skeuomorphic design, where you take something that's a physical artefact of the hardware and force-fit it onto an utterly different device on which it makes no sense whatsoever.

Tic Tac Toe is hilarious

That would be bandcamp, where the free/preview player doesn't have a volume control but the library player does.

The SaaS subscription one fulfilled the same sense for me.

To be fair, Netflix' cheapest subscription option deliberately says that you will not be getting the best audio options including audio levels that are not the same between content. They clearly have the better audio for the higher tiers, so they are deliberately borking things.

That’s actually a really common implementation failure across all platforms. It crops up again and again, in virtually every new thing that people implement. It’s very common to see this problem when you activate a submenu of a menu, and want to move the mouse diagonally to pick some item from the submenu.

I feel like that one’s actually pretty good, why should the ear calibrate to the device when it can be vice versa?

how does it have no control? you just pull it up or down accordingly. i appreciate the joke that it's not a great design, but to say "doesn't have any volume control at all" is an odd thing to say.

> The order of entering an address is street address, city, state, zip code.

In the US. Most of Europe uses street address; postcode, settlement and optionally province; country. There are still enough occasional warts that you shouldn’t dictate the structre of the second line, though: e.g. in France you’ll usually see things like “75005 Paris” but large institutions that get separate deliveries may list addresses like “75231 Paris CEDEX 05”, where everything but “Paris” is a postcode-like routing instruction. Unless you definitely, absolutely know better, just let people type in whatever postal label they want.

>"We can create our own implementation of a drop-down box"

Have been using MS "Dynamics" and wanted to add custom styling as a user. Even small lists/tables have all the off-screen elements destroyed so you can't copy stuff from the page, but also you might have to scroll things into view before they get styled (:has gets broken).

They re-implement tables as a swamp of elements which now lack semantic relationships.

They give the same elements random ids, they're non-deterministic. You can only really style by hierarchy, but for every property they seem to add at least one new element.

Everything about it is slow and cumbersome, and no wonder a simple table has hundreds of elements.

It's so Microsoft, the "don't bake your own widgets" taken to the n-th degree.

> "Oh, we can make the scrollbars in our web page auto-hide so PC users get the same experience as Mac users"

That's interesting. Our UI has scroll bars for sub-panels. On my Mac in FF, the scroll bar is always visible when there is overflow. Same screen on a co-worker's Chrome has the autohiding scroll bars even when there is overflow. So it feels more like a Chrome issue than a Windows issue, but I guess at this point in time we just assume everyone is using Chrome.

Yes — so much friction is introduced by redesigning when there should be refinement at most. Or doing nothing at all.

It takes wisdom to do that, and it doesn’t justify a salary. So we get experimented upon by UX designers at every company.

While the volume controls are fun, at this stage in the thread I’m struck by how few people have got to the point of the article at the end: the “should” question.

Haha, and it's Alsa's best feature by far.

It should make you manually check and uncheck every checkbox between 0 and the target volume. Miss one and it silently dismisses the dialog without changing the volume.

MacOS requires there to be an App as First Responder - what app should be that if you quit all apps?

The nearest that makes sense is Log Out.

I just want it to be able to be set between 0 and 1, because on iPhone

    0 = off
    1 = 30% volume
    10 = 100% volume

+ Mud flaps

Here you go, https://store.thodio.com/products/new-anodized-aluminum-a-bo...

Just 1 more loud

Can you explain that one?