[linux-audio-dev] Knobs, the reply

[Tim Hockin]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2004 at 02:09:08PM +0200, Thorsten Wilms wrote:
> Tim Hockin: please elaborate about velocity sensitve knobs like 
> used by OhmForce.

When you move the mouse slowly, you get very fine control.  When you move
it faster, the control gets coarser.   So you can move a knob from 0.0 to
1.0 quickly with a fast mouse gesture, or you can move it from 0.5 to 0.6
very slowly.

> For those who think radial is bad: in that case knobs shouldn't 
> be used at all! (Tim Hockin: it makes no sense to disagree to a 
> half sentence/meaning!) Popping up a slider doesn't help much, 
> the nature of the control should be clear right away.

I'm still going to put my bet on linear.  If you do a usability study of
linear vs radial, I bet linear will be more obvious and easy to control.
And you will not convince me otherwise until I see a usability test done
with non-LAD users :)

> Oh, and about linear needing 2 directions, up/down for gain 
> and right left for pan (Uwe): Sure. And the widget has 
> to be clear about that in advance.

This is such a bad idea, unless the control is an X/Y control to start
with.