Req: popup asking for permission to unmute each time sound starts playing (to avoid embarrasing moments in meetings)

[lukehutch]

It's a good idea to remember to keep your laptop sound muted all the time, in case you're sitting in a lecture or meeting and inadvertently visit a website that starts playing a background sound without any warning. However it's annoying to have to unmute whenever you want to use sound and to have to remember to re-mute when done. It would be great if you could check a box in the volume control menu that would keep the sound muted by default but would pop up a notification dialog asking whether or not you want to unmute the sound every time something starts sending sound data to pulseaudio. It seems like a simple enough feature and I think it's one a lot of people would use.

[coling]

Personally, I think this is a fairly niche use case, but it shouldn't be too hard to implement as a module. The problem IMO is that the perfect mechanism to implement this feedback system is libnotify, but this will simply break on Ubuntu who have taken it upon themselves to implement and promote an implementation of this spec that does not include action callback (e.g. user feedback). Personally I absolutely disagree with this approach but hey ho, I'm not an Ubuntu user and I wouldn't cripple my applications due to poor design decisions. More info here: http://colin.guthr.ie/2009/02/desktop-notifications-and-user-interaction/

That said, it should be possible to integrate some kind of message *display* on Ubuntu even if all other distros have a nice "unpause" button which would probably be enough considering most laptops (where this module would be useful) have a mute button on them anyway and people could opt just to press it with their visual reminder.

I have got a half finished module which wraps up "notifiying" the user via libnotify, but due to various issues with glib mainloop integration for modules, I've not finalised this. Lennart any news on this?

[lukehutch]

I also disagree with Ubuntu's handling of user notifications, and I'm sure that creating more and more potentially useful popups like this that have limited functionality on Ubuntu might cause them to reconsider.

I don't really think of this as a niche use case at all, I think it has the potential to be widely used -- it's basically "putting your phone on vibrate" for laptops, and almost everybody frequently uses that feature on their phones, so I think the ability to do so on laptops will make immediate intuitive sense to people.

From a pulseaudio advocacy point of view, this feature is another showcase of something that is easy to implement on pulseaudio but would have been hard to implement before pulseaudio.