Trainwreck of Thought

More thoughts on iPhone Mute Switch

Just finished listening to last week’s The Talk Show on the iPhone “Mute” switch. It’s an interesting debate. I like Gruber’s point that, while people feel very strongly one way or the other, there aren’t camps of fanboys here. It really is an interesting design problem.

I think most of the confusion about the iPhone’s Mute switch behavior stems from two other aspects of the iPhone’s volume control design. First, the Mute switch does, in fact, mute most other applications. Second, the physical Volume Up/Down buttons adjust the volume of non-mutable alerts like Calendar. To me, the Volume buttons and the Mute button should behave consistently with each other.

Gruber mentioned that few people embracing the “mute means mute” position report being burned by this issue. I have been burned by it, though thankfully it was during a small company meeting instead of at a symphony. I had set a timer so I could step out in time to feed the parking meter. When I flipped the switch into silent mode, I expected the timer alarm to be a vibrate-only, just like the telephone/voicemail/text alerts in silent mode. Needless to say I was surprised when it the Jazz tone started playing.

I appreciate the notion that alarms are set for more important reasons and shouldn’t be inadvertently suppressed. Like many iPhone users, I use my phone as my alarm clock. Funny enough, I have been burned by not waking up to my alarm clock because I had turned the volume all the way down.

My preferred behavior could be boiled down to this. The mute switch should be behave identically to turning the volume down to zero, with exception to Find My iPhone. I want to be confident that when I tell my phone to STFU, it will do that. Otherwise, I lose trust in the mute switch in any of the places where I’d be embarrassed for the phone to suddenly sound (concert, movie, meeting, interview, church, funeral, wedding, etc…). I don’t want to have to power it off to have a high level of confidence.

Incidentally, my wife seems to think this is how an older version of iOS actually worked. She recalls missing several morning wake-ups because she left the mute switch on, then being surprised by the non-muted alarm clock after upgrading. I can’t remember, though. Did it change?

I don’t think Apple should add a flurry of configuration options for the switch. That just makes it more confusing. Remember the old Nokia phones that had a dozen or so different mode combinations for various circumstances like Normal, Silent, Vibrate Only, Meeting, Dinner, Movie, etc? The idea was to choose the combination of ringer volume and vibrate for various situations. The only ones I ever used were Normal, Vibrate-Only, and Silent. Everything else was too much.

Monetary policy: Money delusion →

Free Exchange on The Economist:

After years of bitter experience, most rich countries put their money supplies in the hands of independent central banks, because it was determined that linking them to the supply of shiny rocks often generated dangerous and costly economic volatility. Sometimes, it turned out, the demand for money would skyrocket, and when the supply of shiny rocks didn’t rise accordingly a dangerous deflationary downturn followed. Now, much of the rich world finds itself in a period of deep economic uncertainty and fear, in which safe stores of value are in high demand, and that includes many of the colourful pieces of paper rich-country governments print. The wise thing to do would be to make more of that paper, so that we don’t run into the same, not-enough-shiny-rocks problem we did in the 1930s. A lot of people find this to be a frightening prospect, because they associate money printing with inflation, but they’re only considering the supply side of the money-printing equation. If central banks are committed to maintaining price stability—and absolutely nothing in the behaviour of central banks through the recovery suggsts they aren’t—then there’s no reason for a dangerous departure from trend inflation (to the upside, anyway). Through this crisis, with just a few rare exceptions, when central banks have erred they have erred on the not-enough-shiny-rocks side.

Perhaps opposition to Social Security has become a runaway train, a rhetorical and intellectual commitment too strong to give up even after it has lost its connection to an actual policy programme. But the effect of continued inaccurate attacks on the foundations of Social Security is to deepen most people’s confusion about the actual soundness of the concept, and to reinforce young people’s scepticism that they will ever benefit from it. I’ve been hearing such scepticism from my own cohort for almost 20 years now. It doesn’t make any sense. If my generation does in fact fail to receive our Social Security checks, it will only be because we inexplicably decided to vote ourselves out of them.

— Social Security: A monstrous truth | The Economist

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Shared by Josh
I’ve been asking for this for years!!! Finally.

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