lane@sumex-aim.stanford.edu (Christopher Lane) (07/21/89)
In article <1989Jul14.151221.13930@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca> Alex Nishri writes: >It would be nice if the "mute" state was reset when one logged out. Failing >that, it would be nice if there were a visual indication that "mute" had been >activated. I've a partial solution to this problem (and another as well) below but first a note on the 'mute' debate. According to the description (chapter 22, page 108) of the functional access to the mute control: SNDSetMute() mutes and unmutes the internal speaker and headphone level as speakerOn is 0 and nonzero, respectively. there is no distinction between what mute does for the speakers and for the headphones. One would hope the keyboard control would do the same (which I take it is not the case based on the recent descriptions of behavior). On a related topic, I've been annoyed that though one can set the brightness and volume from the Preferences application, just as one does mouse settings, these display values are not restored on subsequent login to the console/Workspace, unlike mouse settings. I've sent some notes off to NeXT and the response has ranged from 'This has been logged as Bug Number ...' to 'Things are functioning as designed'. Clearly there is a parallel between mouse settings and display settings (brightness, volume and mute control) that has been missed. To correct for this (just until 1.0 comes out I hope) I wrote a program, SoundAndLight, which is an interfaces-less (except for an icon) application that resets the values for screen brightness and speaker volume to those values selected using the Preferences application (Preferences saves the values in the user database even though they do not get used/restored on subsequent (console/Workspace) logins, even if you auto-start Preferences). SoundAndLight also tries to restore the mute setting (it adds a new user database item) but unfortunately, due to a still unconfirmed bug in SNDSetMute, it is not able to turn the mute control on if it is off (it can only turn off the mute control if it is on or leave it off if it is off). I've FTP'd the source, binary and README files (in compressed tar format) to the submissions directory on the cs.orst.edu NeXT archive. - Christopher PS: If this is redundant with existing functionality, do let me know.