ONGOING DEFAULT THEME CONTEST!!!

[Llorean]

The difference between the "play" icon and the "stereo/mono" icon is that it if you've read the manual to discover the play/pause button, you will quickly understand what the play icon means because it will change states with the music.

Meanwhile, the stereo/mono icon changes no in reaction to direct user input, but often alongside signal quality. It can in fact show up for a station that is supposed to be in stereo because the signal is too poor and the device has chosen to use mono instead. Because of this there's not necessarily an immediately obvious way to tell what it represents.

The play/pause icon presents feedback for user input, while the stereo/mono icon is, generally, a representation of the status of the device or the signal, so at least some attempt should be made to make it communicate without context or with limited context, where play/pause will always have the context of user input alongside its change of state.

While I've seen the boxes above, I don't think we need the whole box (not having nearly as many channels, especially given FM radio) so the top line idea may be fine.


As to the circles being "far more common," I wouldn't say they are. In my experience, I've never seen those icons before in my life, while the box with dots is on a wide variety of electronics, DVD cases, and plenty of other stuff. So it may be more common where you are, but that's not necessarily true universally at all.

And again, a single circle without context is very, very meaningless. In the case that someone's only picking up mono, the icon just isn't going to be helpful. I still haven't seen a convincing reason why it needs to be an icon in the first place, honestly.

We could always use a stylized speaker for mono and pair of speakers for stereo, of course. Same concept as the circles, but with actual meaningful symbols.




I don't see how ascending bars would look at all similar to the volume icon (which is a single solid, rather than separated bars). An option would be to mirror the proposed icon though, so that at least the curve isn't in the same direction as the RSS icon.

[Ezraghast]

I recognize the circles straight away. In any case, once they are described as representing 'stereo/mono' signal in the manual, then that is what they become. They're graceful I think.

[Llorean]

Not everyone will have read that section of the manual. Especially given that the screen is supposed to be communicative, we should try to avoid making it necessary to use the manual to interpret. We could easily pick custom icons for anything, and use strange terms for options rather than ones that clearly tell what it means but there's a benefit to trying to minimize the requirement of the manual.

Graceful should be sought, but only if it doesn't interfere with usefulness - we should at least try to come up with an alternative that isn't likely to have a significant population asking "what's all this then?"

[Ezraghast]

...we should try to avoid making it necessary to use the manual to interpret. We could easily pick custom icons for anything, and use strange terms for options rather than ones that clearly tell what it means but there's a benefit to trying to minimize the requirement of the manual.

Lots of posts i read tell me to use the manual or read a sticky. Consistency would help

[yapper]

We could always use a stylized speaker for mono and pair of speakers for stereo, of course. Same concept as the circles, but with actual meaningful symbols.

Personally I recognize the circles as a stereo indicator (but maybe that is more common to Europeans than Americans?) but the use of speakers should be more obvious to everyone.

[Llorean]

Lots of posts i read tell me to use the manual or read a sticky. Consistency would help

Yes, if you can't figure something out read the manual. How is this inconsistent at all with trying to make things simple enough to not need the manual?

Basically, things should be easy to figure out where possible. If necessity requires a degree of complexity that can't be intuitive, or if there's no good intuitive or self-explanatory solution, then the user should reference the manual.

The manual should only be required in places where it's the best solution - if it's possible for a screen that's supposed to present information to do so in a way that doesn't require a reference that is the ideal. The reference should only be the second option.

[TexasRockbox]

I've seen miniaturized stereo headphones used as an indicator of stereo in portable radios while in mono there is nothing displayed in the position.

For example, a modification of this:


It's simple, could be used in players with monochrome displays and shouldn't take too many pixels.

[[Saint]]

Hey guys,

Firstly, sorry I haven't had the time to work on this anywhere near as much as I expected.

Secondly, regarding the Mono and Stereo indication:

Maybe it seems a little too obvious, but does it need icons for everything?

Why not simply use the text Mono/Stereo? To me that seems to be the most sensible thing to do in this case. I think an icon should only be displayed in cases where it will be immediately apparent to the user what the icon represents.

Multifont could be used to make the text unobtrusive (5-6-7px or so), and help to keep the themes visually similar for monochrome/black & white/colour targets.

The benefit of using a text string is that Mono and Stereo already exist in the .lang files so they could be translated to the users chosen language using the %Sx|<lang string>| tag.
Then there would be no "What the heck is that?" at all... 

[St.]

PS: For what it's worth, the "rings" style mono/stereo icons are completely foreign to me here in NZ...

[yapper]

Why not simply use the text Mono/Stereo?

How useful is that for non-English speakers?

[Llorean]

As he mentioned they're in the lang files, so they'll be in whatever the UI language is as long as you use the WPS localization feature.

So the answer to "how useful is that for non-English speakers" would be "exactly as useful as the rest of Rockbox" I guess.

[JdGordon]

What is the actual point of displaying the stereo/mono at all? it doesnt really give any useful information. So because of that I tihnk it would be cleaner to use icons (which are more universal anyway).

I like the idea of the headset a few posts up.

[[Saint]]

What is the actual point of displaying the stereo/mono at all? it doesn't really give any useful information.

How useful is that for non-English speakers?

I think perhaps there was some form of misunderstanding? The information it gives is surely just as useful as an icon for the same purpose if not more so due to the fact that it has the ability to be translated, and as such is universal.

I didn't literally mean displaying the text "Stereo/Mono" as that would serve absolutely no purpose at all, but instead I meant displaying the word "Stereo" for stereo, and "Mono" for mono.
To me, that makes more sense than an icon, as this discussion seems to have proved that there indeed is not a universal symbol that can be used to represent either mode.

I personally don't think that anything is going to be as clear as text. It requires no extra bitmaps, there is no need for target specific implementation, it will (probably, depending on the font used) take up less screen estate, the strings for Mono and Stereo are already present in the .lang files, and it can be easily translated into the users chosen language using:

Code: [Select]

%?ts<%Sx|Stereo||%Sx|Mono|>^{How simple is that?}

I also have to say that I'm not a fan of the "headset icon" idea from a few posts back either, to me, if I saw that I would probably assume:

"Oh, what's this icon? It must mean I have my headphones plugged in...Well that's irrelevant, of course I do it's a DAP and I'm listening to FM radio which requires the headphones be plugged in to achieve a sufficient signal"


[St.]

[mc2739]

The problem I see with using Stereo/Mono as translatable text is that you have no way of knowing how much screen space will be needed to display the string.  If the translated string is not the same width as the English string there will either be too much space allocated or not enough space allocated.  The latter condition will cause the text to be clipped or scrolled, neither of which would look proper for a status indicator.

[yapper]

The volume indicator could be modifed to represent two channels, based on the current volume indicator but with a mirrored version behind the original for stereo, and the regular version for mono.

[Llorean]

Or we could just insist that the peak meter finally be split so that you can have a pair of peak meters for stereo, and a single one for mono (if we can even do peak meter on Radio, I don't even know).