Re: Yet another interface idea
Re: Yet another interface idea
- Subject: Re: Yet another interface idea
- From: Jim Wintermyre <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 7 Oct 2002 22:03:01 -0700
Just wanted to mention a couple ideas that I've used in the past to address some of the issues that have been brought up recently in regard to using knobs etc.:
- In VST, there is a call for the plugin to query the host as to its "knob mode". Current options are linear, circular, and relative circular. Linear means dragging to the right and/or up increases the value; circular means clicking on the knob snaps to that position, then tracks the mouse radially around the knob's center; relative circular is like circular except that the initial click doesn't cause the value to snap to the click location. Thus, the plugin can change its knob behavior based on user preferences that the user sets in the host. Most VST host apps don't actually implement this, but some do. It might be useful to have something similar in AU.
- For getting more fine control than you could given limited UI screen real estate for a given control, you can go into a "fine control" mode when a certain key modifier is held down. For example, with the shift key down, you could make it such that it takes 5 times as many pixels or degrees or whatever for the same amount of parameter adjustment. Make it such that the smallest motion adjusts your parameter in its smallest quantization size. In this mode, the onscreen position of your knob/slider/whatever may not update each time you move the mouse, but the textual display will (if you have one). The mouse tracking will obviously be out of sync with the actual position of the control this way, but that's fine because at this point the user is only concerned with the fine control, and this gives you a large amount of adjustment. In fact, you could even hide the cursor during this tracking, and replace it at the original click position when done. I've seen some recent apps do this.
- Related to the previous point, if you have sliders that have a certain background with tick marks, when you're in "fine control" mode, you could temporarily swap out the background with a "view" into a larger background with more detailed and wider-spaced tickmarks. As you move the fader up, for example, the fader itself would slowly move up (slower than the mouse), and the view into the larger background would also move up, but not necessarily by the same amount (the onscreen portion would appear to be moving down, but the *view into the larger bitmap* would be moving up). It's hard to explain, and that probably doesn't make any sense, but a few years ago I was working on a product that used this idea for fine control of volume faders in the mixer window, and it was quite cool.
Jim
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