Lucid’s New Sound Indicator Applet Thing or How The Sound Applet Went To Suck
Historically, the volume applet in Gnome was just that. It was it’s own applet. You added the sound control independently of any notification area or indicator applet. This was awesome! It was better than Windows. It was better than OS X. You could place the volume applet anywhere on the panel and, most importantly to me as someone who uses volume a lot, you could shove it to any of the four corners for easy mouse to a corner and scroll to adjust volume!
In Karmic, the volume applet was removed. It was sucked up by the notification area. You weren’t able to control the exact position where the volume control ended up as it could be pushed by other notification area applets whose order we have no control. This was less cool than previously, as you couldn’t go to a corner and scroll if you wanted to maximized Fitt’s law. At least in Karmic, we could find the volume, hover it, and scroll the wheel though so this had advantages over OS X and Windows.
Enter the suck! As of Beta 1 in Lucid, we have no exact control of the volume, it goes horizontally instead of vertically, and you can’t just hover it and scroll. You have to click the icon, then click and drag the slider. Suck!
1
I hear ya man. I appreciate that they’re trying new things. But this is lame!
2
I agree, every app that switches to that stupid indicator applet sucks, transmission and empathy suck using it too.
3
I agree wholeheartedly. The ability to hover and scroll to adjust the volume is one HUGE advantage that Ubuntu always had over other OSes. I just downloaded and am running Beta 1, and I can’t believe the idiotic design of this volume control thing.
This is absolutely horrible!
4
Why can’t you just run gnome-volume-control-applet?
5
You can. The point is, they went from something with lots of functionality to something that barely works. It doesn’t even have tooltips!
6
gnome-volume-control-applet just puts it in notification area. Still not its own applet that you can move independently.
7
But look on the bright side: with this new indicator applet in Lucid you always have a mail icon next to your volume button. This is what the people have always wanted!