[linux-audio-dev] Knobs / widget design

[Dave Robillard]

On Wed, 2004-06-09 at 22:25, Dan Harper wrote:
> I for one dislike the knob design, you just cannot make fine adjustments
> easily.  Someone said that you can take the mouse out to a greater
> radius from the knob, but that is just plain silly.  While you move the
> mouse out from the knob, you're bound to make small adjustments to the
> value of the knob, unless you're a super-human, ultra-precision mouser! 
> This means that you're original value of the knob has been lost, and
> you'd have to live with that, or move it to it's original position
> first, and then make your slight adjustment.
> 
> Also, it's just not natural for me to move my mouse in a circle, the
> natural movement of my hand is not a circle, try to draw a perfect
> circle in the Gimp sometime by mouse! This means, that at different
> parts of the knob tweaking, you'd be changing value by an unpredictable
> amount depending on how good your circle is.  This means also that
> left-handed mousers are going to change values at the opposite
> sensitivity level at different parts of the motion.
> 
> There is no easy solution as far as I can see, but what about a few
> physical knobs, cheaply built, that send some kind of data via USB or
> something that can change values.  That's the best way I reckon, except
> for the cost factor.
> 
> I'll keep thinking about a purely software solution though.
> 
> Dan

Well, the hardware is always an option of course (a fader/knob box is
top on MY list-of-things-I-can't-afford anyway) but the UI still has to
be as good as possible.

Can't map a MIDI controller to every single knob you need to tweak!

-DR-