Re: [LAD] Mouse/knob interaction

On Tue, 2010-09-07 at 22:35 +0200, Olivier Guilyardi wrote: I've said this all along - "photorealistic" GUIs for softsynths *aren't* pointless eyecandy. How the app looks materially affects the way we respond to it and how we perceive its behaviour. In an informal and not-terribly-controlled experiment, I set up three versions of nekobee. All had identical voice engines, the only difference between them being the knob and background pixmaps. One was the "normal" silver with light-grey knobs, one was black with dark grey knobs, and one was a plasticky-looking red with black shiny plastic-looking knobs. Of the four people who tried them, they *all* thought that the silver one sounded smoother, the black one had a warmer bassier sound and the red one had a more cutting, middle-y and distorted sound.

Now, if you want to use a "generic" host-supplied UI, that's fine. If you want a GUI that uses standard toolkit elements (GtkVScale, for instance) that's fine too. But - I think a softsynth has to *look* like something you want to fiddle with. Even if it's just a screenshot, it's got to make you want to find one and have a shot of it. Remember your first gearlust? It's got to do that. As for little boxes with numbers, if I wanted to sit and fiddle with those I'd go and work out my tax rebate on a spreadsheet...