On the Behavior of the iPhone Mute Switch
Yesterday the New York Times reported on an incident where an audience member at a New York Philharmonic performance interrupted a Mahler symphony (literally… the conductor stopped the performance) with an iPhone alarm.
It was understandable, in context. And I think John Gruber gets it exactly right:
You can’t design around every single edge case, and a new iPhone user who makes the reasonable but mistaken assumption that the mute switch silences everything, with an alarm set that he wasn’t aware of, and who is sitting in the front row of the New York Philharmonic when the accidental alarm goes off, is a pretty good example of an edge case.