[linux-audio-dev] Knobs / widget design (radial movement)

[Dave Griffiths]

On Fri, 25 Jun 2004 17:28:09 +0200, Thorsten Wilms wrote
> On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 09:46:36AM +0200, Burkhard Woelfel wrote:
> > 
> > Radial movement on control elements often confuses me.

...
 
> Well, the scaling issue was not obvious to me, I needed to 
> read about it somewhere, but afterwards made extensive 
> use of this feature in Cubase.
> 
> I'm going to update the knobs with graphics like you 
> described (had the idea from the beginning on, but had 
> concerns about flickering / too much action on the 
> screen).
> 
> But I think fan-sliders would be the better solution in 
> most cases.

This is an interesting topic, I think I've missed most of it though :(
 
Personally I'm a radial knob kinda guy - I remember using the
scaling-by-moving-the-mouse-further-away thing years ago with spiralloops. The
other advantage of knobs is that they take up less space than sliders, and to
me collectively look more like a musical instrument controls than a bunch of
sliders (I don't know where this comes from)

I'm not anti sliders as I use a lot of them - although partly because they are
better supported in toolkits (I'm currenly using tk (yes tk!)) and I don't
have a choice.

I like your fan idea Thorsten, but I also think it could work invisibly - ie
no need for the transparent overlay. This would take a bit of learning that it
 was there to begin with - but transparent graphics like that are expensive
(yeah, GPU's I know - but its something to keep in mind) and unnecessary after
learing how to use the control. 

It would be good to collect a repository of existing GUI elements in
commercial packages - dunno what the legal implications would be, but it would
be useful.

cheers,

dave