I’m sure by now you’ve heard the story of the guy whose ringtone stopped a performance of the New York Philharmonic
The unmistakably jarring sound of an iPhone marimba ring interrupted the soft and spiritual final measures of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 at the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday night. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did something almost unheard-of in a concert hall: He stopped the performance. But the ringing kept on going, prompting increasingly angry shouts in the audience directed at the malefactor.
In addition to the public humiliation of the moment, the Internet proceeded to fall our hapless music lover’s head. It sounds like he was actually the victim of poor user interface design from Apple (unusual!). From the same article:
He said he made sure to turn it off before the concert, not realizing that the alarm clock had accidentally been set and would sound even if the phone was in silent mode.
Ouch! I certainly understand the design tradeoff: would you rather put people at risk of public humiliation when their silent phones makes noise, or would you rather have somebody sleep through an important meeting because they silenced their phone, forgetting about their alarm clock?
I’d vote for silencing everything when you mute the phone, but pop a warning if you mute the phone with alarms pending. Or maybe a warning that lets you choose whether you want to also silence alarms or not?
I dunno, I’d happily leave the details to the generally-awesome UI designers at Apple.
(As long as we are talking about Apple UI, there is a little tweak I want: I want AutoCorrect to make a little noise whenever it offers me a correction. I can’t really touch type on the iPhone or the iPad (can’t imagine I’m alone here), so I never see the little popups in time to either cancel them or to hit SPACE to accept them. Some subtle sound that cues me to look up from my typing would be lovely.)
Update: John Gruber points out that it’s not worth over-complicating things for edge cases, and yeah, he’s probably right.
Update 2: See also Marco Arment and Andy Ihnatko.
