[LAU] turn your tablet into a real physical interface

[Len Ovens]

On Mon, 3 Nov 2014, Simon Wise wrote:

> it is the combination of real knobs and faders with the visual feed back of a 
> touch screen for selecting and viewing things that works well ... it has been 
> the basis of some very high end studio mixing systems for a while now. A

Even lower end digital mixers use this mix of interface, Yes it can be 
very flexable. Adjusting EQ "Q" with two fingers, while at the same time 
setting centre frequescy and level is nice.

> biggish button displayed on a touchsceen requires less fiddling/distraction 
> than using a mouse and cursor if you are mostly using your hands for the 
> keyboard and real controls ... plus there are some types of control that can 
> be done with multi-touch or pen quite nicely ... (certainly not knobs, faders 
> and buttons)

Using touch screen over mouse for those things that are on screen I like. 
Using a touch ecreen to replace tactile level controls I am less sure 
of... Though to be honest some of the very early versions I used to 
control overall velocity on the Atari might have worked well with 
touchscreens. They were not visual sliders or knobs, but a button/label 
where clicking and holding while moving up or down adjusted level. While 
moving up or down the mouse pointer may have been over some other control, 
but so long as the mouse button was held down it did not matter. The only 
visual feed back was the numeric value of the velocity offset changing. 
Horizontal movement of the mouse was ignored. The only downside for this 
becomes realestate. A control too close to the edge of the screen ends up 
with a limited range of control... That is a control near the top is 
limited to moving the level higher and a control near the bottom is 
limited to how much lower it can go. Designing the display to use the 
screen edges for display only use and putting controls towards screen 
centre could help or defining up as up/right and down as down/left might 
help too. Any of the ideas used on the Atari would work just as easy on 
any GUI. In fact the same techniques are used in some software, what 
brought it to mind was the control density was very high (to compensate 
for the lower resolution of screens at the time). The quality of "rodents" 
seems to have dropped since too... holding and dragging worked better 
without mouse button skipps almost every mouse seems to develop very 
quickly.

The idea of using the touch screen to select the control and then using a 
knob/shuttle/joystick/trackball/mouse to change the value also makes a lot 
of sense. Most of the digital mixers I have seen use both a large number 
of real knobs/faders with selection to extend them.



--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net