Re: Inspirational exercise!
Re: Inspirational exercise!
- Subject: Re: Inspirational exercise!
- From: Herbie Robinson <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 3 Oct 2002 15:42:28 -0400
On donderdag, okt 3, 2002, at 17:28 Europe/Amsterdam, Thomas Hudson wrote:
Knob widgets that use rotation to adjust are hideously wrong. However,
a knob that uses slider-like linear motion is quite natural to use.
I still remember the first time I encountered one, and I wouldn't
call it natural; although, once you make some sort of imaginary
mental leap, they are pretty easy to use. I still prefer sliders
when there is room. The problem with sliders is that in order to
have enough resolution for most tasks, they need a few hundred pixels
of motion (An example of a stupid slider is the Pro Tools pan
slider). I find popup sliders to be annoying. They also tend to
obfuscate things you really want to see (like the meters).
The problem is that it *looks* like you should turn, although you can drag it.
So it has the wrong shape - and moreover once clicked it does not
give feedback where to go with the mouse. So for instance the
indicator on the knob points at 4 o'clock (down right). The sound
level is at 9. You want to decrease the sound level so you click on
the knob. If you would turn the knob with you hand, you would turn
it counterclockwise - that is turn the indicator first upwards and
then downwards to the left. Now if the knob works like a slider and
you move upwards (like in the real world), the sound level
increases to 10. Wrong! You need to drag it downwards to turn down
the volume. The visual appearance never indicated that.
Yeah, it has all those things wrong with it, but everybody and their
brother has used it at this point; so, the user community doesn't
really have a problem with it.
But knobs are a requirement for saving screen real estate. If you don't
believe me, fire up IB and design an interface using only sliders for
an eight channel mixer with volume, pan, treble, bass, fx send 1, fx
send2, etc. You might be able to fit it all on the screen, but it will
look horrible.
There are other ways to save space.
Idea #1
A small slider that zooms as you move the mouse perpendicular to the
slider's normal motion. The zooming would start when you moved the
mouse perpendicularly off the slider's "thumb". The pop-up would be
very transparent so you could still see what was underneath it.
Idea #2
Knobs with pop sliders that they user can turn off via preferences.
In reality, most knob implementations are essentially invisible
pop-up sliders... Actually, why make it a switch, just let the
transparency of the popup sliders be a user preference: Anywhere
between 0 and 100%!
--
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