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On the subject of controls that don't translate well, Rotary knobs are great as a physical device, But they feel terrible as a mouse controlled item. The bigge
by somat 4y ago
On the subject of controls that don't translate well, Rotary knobs are great as a physical device, But they feel terrible as a mouse controlled item.
The biggest offenders are audio plugins, they tend to be very skeuomorphic, almost to a fault. I don't mind a little skeuomorphism, in fact I think it can help readability of the interface. But the way audio plugins take it to an extreme and cram as many rotary knobs in there as possible is maddening.
- widdershins 4y agoA well-designed digital rotary knob isn't too hard to use - but it must be set by simply dragging up and down, not in a rotary motion, which is very unnatural with a mouse. They remain popular in audio software not just because of skeuomorphism (though that doubtless plays a role) but because they are a space-efficient way of putting lots of controls on a page. Audio software is usually highly parametric, so that's important. Even though I understand this need, I'm still very keen on audio software that tries to break out of the 'everything is a knob' paradigm when it makes sense.
- jakear 4y agoGood point about converting linear motion to rotary for mouse users. I hadn't considered that as I only ever use touch screens and touch pads so to me the rotary is just fine (aka, touch the option you want). That said, it's just a radio button, would you expect radio buttons to activate on scroll too? For continuous numeric inputs I modeled the slider, and enabled scroll control. One issue there is intercepting horizontal scroll on touchpads is flakey and about two thirds of the time you go back instead of moving the thing right.
- lmm 4y ago> That said, it's just a radio button, would you expect radio buttons to activate on scroll too? If you represent it as a knob then it's not though. A knob is something you turn, scrolling is the natural way to approach that.
- Falkon1313 4y agoA digital knob shouldn't need any dragging nowadays with modern mice. Instead you should be able to just point to it and spin the scrollwheel. It's a rotary motion that feels somewhat analogous to spinning a physical knob with an easy physical transition from coarse-grained spin to fine-tuning adjustment.
- fivre 4y agoa lot of audio stuff is designed with the expectation that you'll be binding the control to a MIDI controller if it's important, so in that sense the skeumorphism makes a lot of sense. if the VST knob is just a visual representation of something that's bound to another MIDI-bound knob in a DAW, it doesn't really matter if the mouse UX is bad, since it'll probably only be used briefly while dialing in settings, and then serve as a visual UX thing after