3 ms·
Was going to say. It saves screen space - should you need to save screen space - while allowing fine control. A slider would take much more screen area. This i
by TheOtherHobbes 5y ago
Was going to say. It saves screen space - should you need to save screen space - while allowing fine control. A slider would take much more screen area.
This is a bigger issue on synth VSTs that have tens or hundreds of controls. When screen resolutions were smaller it was a toss-up between hybrid vertical/rotational scrolling, horizontal/vertical window scrollbars to get the controls to appear at all, and multipage UIs.
Some designs, like Korg's MS20 VST, had all of the above.
- goodpoint 5y agoYou could keep the vertical "out-of-box" dragging but use a little vertical bar to show the current level. Humans are terrible at reading angles quickly.
- morsch 5y agoHumans may be terrible at reading pie charts quickly, but I think we do fine with visualizations such as clocks, gauges and circular controls. I wouldn't even be surprised if a circular gauge can be read more quickly or with less attention than a linear one (size/area being equal).
- goodpoint 5y agoWhen staring at a mixer with 60 or more knobs you can see the difference in reading speed very quickly: ◐◑◒◓◐◐◒◒◓◐◓◓◐◐◑◐◒◓◓◐◐◑◒◓ (oops, HN is not showing the unicode rectangles but you can imagine that they look like a barchart and you can easily spot the highest and lowest)