[LAD] a case for a knob control standard?

[Arnold Krille]

On Tuesday 28 September 2010 21:00:44 hermann wrote:
> Am Dienstag, den 28.09.2010, 18:44 +0100 schrieb pete shorthose:
> > if there was a standard that described the expected behavior of commonly
> > used
> > (or just useful) knob control methods, perhaps in the form of a short
> > draft specification on freedesktop.org, would people (ie developers) use
> > it?
> > 
> > expectations and requirements clearly differ so we would probably need to
> > gather together and discuss those in use with a mind to removing or
> > combining
> > similar methods, explicitly naming them and defining their behavior in
> > the abstract. if we required that applications implement a set few
> > methods as configurable options (as a minimum) in order to comply then
> > we might eventually
> > see the back of the unpredictable mess we have now. it wouldn't matter
> > how they
> > are configured, be it gconf, dotfile, command line, prefs dialog, env
> > variable..
> > as long as it could be done.
> > 
> > worth thinking about or is it just too niche? are the actual real world
> > applications too varied and specific to make it useful?
> > 
> > for example it would certainly be nice to crack open a library config
> > or application prefs window and assign VLMC (vertical linear motion
> > control*)
> > to the left mouse button and RMC (radial motion control*)
> > to shift + left mouse button, and have those conform to the expected
> > standards.
> > or even just to set KNOB_CONTROL_METHOD=RMC in your global environment
> > and have all the adherent applications just do what you expect.
> > 
> > it seems to me that standards (of the mutually agreed rather than
> > officially sanctioned variety, since the latter is impractical) provide
> > the best means to bring about common behavior in sovereign systems.
> > naturally it would be completely platform independent.
> > just having named control methods with explicitly defined behavior may
> > help matters
> > too.
> > 
> > cheers,
> > pete.
> > 
> > *crappy names i'm sure, but you get the idea.
> 
> Sound's like a good Idea, but I believe that it would only work when
> standard GUI tool-kits provide the knob control functions. That will be
> the first step to standardise knobs/circular controllers.

Yeah, why start with the easy things we can control (like an audio-gui-
standard-definition-and-configuration like proposed here) when we can aim for 
the higher targets and loose all momentum there.

When such an audio-gui standard and configuration is developed, I would love to 
participate. And use it in my apps. I think its a good idea, especially the 
idea of allowing the user to switch between circular and linear behaviour for 
round controls. And have that changes affect all apps supporting this 
"standard".

Please go on with this, don't bother with toolkits and how they implement 
graphics, make it a configuration definition, a global / per-user config file and 
think about some simple libs to give easy access to these configs in all major 
languages like C, C++, python and maybe some more. (The less dependencies 
these libs have, the higher the chance of adoption...)

Have fun,

Arnold
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