[linux-audio-dev] Re: [linux-audio-user] Linux Audio Human Interface Guidelines, 0.01 (was Re: mouse wheel behavior and RFC: human interface, guidelines)

[Lee Revell]

On Wed, 2004-08-25 at 17:52, Paul Winkler wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 25, 2004 at 06:02:44AM +0000, philicorda wrote:
> > Paul Winkler wrote:
> > 
> > "I could swear I remember seeing an old tube compressor that
> > had a gain reduction meter with "more" to the right, so it
> > moved in opposition to the corresponding VU meter.
> > No idea what model it was, and this was about 6 years ago
> > so I could be mistaken.
> > 
> > I wonder how consistent this is in the world of hardware?
> > maybe I'll pop a question on rec.audio.pro."
> 
> btw, i had myself turned around again :-)
> If the gain reduction meter is moving in opposition the VU meter,
> then "more" gain reduction is to the left, not right.
>  
> > I built a tube compressor like that, an Altec436c.
> > The 'gain reduction' meter measures the bias current of the vari-mu 
> > valve, which is reduced when gain reduction is required.
> > The meter goes from right to left. (Any other way would require more 
> > circuitry, so I think it may just be a lucky accident.)
> 
> ah, that's an interesting point.
>  
> > Talking of meters, don't some phase meters often go left *and* right 
> > from a centre point to show averaged phase difference between the channels?
> 
> think so.

>From the wide variety of responses describing all types of meters, it
seems that the HIG should steer clear of this topic and leave it the
developer's responsibility to make your meters intuitive.  HIGs are not
about restricting the range of functionality you can implement, they are
just there to prevent needless usability regressions (aka usability
bugs).  An example of a usability regression would be when a user
expects the leftmost menu to be 'File' and the 'Save' option to be found
in it, but then encounter some app which puts the 'Save' option on the
'Edit' menu.  Since neither way is intrinsically better, the former is
the correct choice, because that is the way users expect it to work.

Is there any known broken meter behavior that we should prohibit?  So
far I have not seen an example in this thread.

Lee