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The whole idea of knob is stupid both on touch screens as well as desktop. There are other good alternatives which are far more intuitive than knobs. Knobs are

The whole idea of knob is stupid both on touch screens as well as desktop. There are other good alternatives which are far more intuitive than knobs. Knobs are good when you can physically rotate them like for example in a car. But there we are removing knobs and adding touchscreens.

LoganDark 1y ago
Hmm, for alternatives, are you thinking of things like spinboxes? (I know them mainly from Blender)
MattPalmer1086 1y ago
Completely agree. They are very prevalent in DAWs and audio plugins, as they try to look like physical hardware. I absolutely hate interacting with them, either with touch or mouse. I guess the one advantage they have is they don't take up as much room as a slider, maybe?
- bigyabai 1y ago
  I tolerate knobs in DAWs/plugins... if they let you manually enter a value. So much fiddling can be skipped by dialing in a value directly. Without manual entry, you trap users in fiddly UI hell.
  - dleeftink 1y ago
    When knobs are fiddly, most VST3s offer high-resolution midi mapping for precise automation. I agree through, that a precise readout is a must as the 'knob units' may not always map to what is displayed by the VST host.
hermitwriter 1y ago
Designing 3D real-world interactions for 2D screens is fun. Literally fun. Rarely useful.
- sethwebster 1y ago
  Yeah, the paradigms are just too different. I prefer sliders for knobs… just much more natural with a mouse or touchscreen.
  - hermitwriter 1y ago
    It's hard to replicate the "coolness" factor though of a true studio control board. It begs to be touched and knobs beg to be turned...
Fraterkes 1y ago
The point of knobs is that you can fit a ton of sliders in a limited space, and that you can wildly adjust them with very little movement. Both are requirments for a lot of music software. What would the alternative be?
- tobr 1y ago
  You can do this with a normal slider as well. Map a large pointer movement to a small control movement.
  - Fraterkes 1y ago
    I meant the opposite: with only a small mouse movement you can fling a knob wildly, which is great if you want to do a quick transition on eg a high pass filter or a low pass filter
- dleeftink 1y ago
  I think multi-zone drumpads on the recent Akai MPC Live 3 provide a good middle ground, quite similar to mapping various zones on a trackpad. The Macbook touchstrip was a cool (but maybe too cool) addition as well, similarly introduced by various DAW controllers (Push, Machine, MPC Live, others).
  - Fraterkes 1y ago
    I meant that in the context of a digital ui, knobs are great because theyre a way to fit a finely-adjustable slider in a small area. In the physical world there’s obviously lots of alternatives
- StopDisinfo910 1y ago
  > What would the alternative be? Large slider which doesn’t change place, buttons to select what you are adjusting. Display the current value on the button if you need it to stay visible. The magic of software ux is that you can actually replace things on a screen in a way you can’t on a physical device.
Cockbrand 1y ago
Others have already pointed out that a knob saves a lot of space. And I'm surprised myself how usable a knob is when controlled with a vertical trackpad scroll gesture. Probably still a frustrating control on a touch screen, though.
duped 1y ago
If you've ever used pro audio software you come to love rotary over linear sliders. They're simply more flexible and dense when you have many parameters to tweak.
- kowbell 1y ago
  Linear sliders are also finite, while rotary encoders can spin forever.
  - siriaan 1y ago
    In the physical world, sure, but there's no reason why a virtual linear slide could not be made endless
    - squeaky-clean 1y ago
      You'd have a discontinuity. A knob naturally rotates back to its start. A slider never does and would have to pacman-wrap itself back to the start. There's no motion you could make that would infinitely increase without a break. A knob you can just move your cursor in a clockwise circle infinitely.
  - baxuz 1y ago
    Yeah but that doesn't have much value as you lose the value indicator. If you don't need a value indicator, you don't need a circular knob as an affordance. You can have a whatever as it just reacts to your input. If you do have a value indicator which is "infinite", such as a numerical value display, it's better to make it interactive and place the interaction on top of it, instead of splitting the UI between a value indicator and the input. A lot of software does this.
baxuz 1y ago
It's really not. You're looking at it the wrong way, and haven't come across any of the use cases it solves. If you have limited space and you need to both interact with and see fractional ranges, knobs are the way to go. It's way more glanceable, and the entire range is displayed in the knob itself. Think of it this way: Both a circular knob and a slider have 2 elements: the interactive area and the range display. However, the slide has the same knob size that is set on a large track displaying the selected range by moving the knob, whereas the circular knob has the track displayed radially inside it. For the track example — the knob is the only interactive element for all practical purposes when it comes to precise tweaking of values. Single clicks on a track usually don't support further dragging after the initial click on any OS or UI implementation. This comes with many positive sides: - The interactive area (handle) is always in the same place. - The interactive area is in practice always bigger than a knob on a linear slider. - Adjusting the knob doesn't reposition your cursor, no matter what you do with the mouse. - The circular track allows for much easier visual identification of fractions compared to a linear track due to its radial nature. - The indicator can be a single pixel, whereas on the linear track, the knob is a fairly imprecise blob due to its nature of needing to serve a dual purpose. This means it's a lot more precise. - There is a lot more granularity in the same surface area. - Interaction precision isn't limited to the size of the track where it needs to scale linearly - You don't need to dynamic element rendering or resizing which may cover other things you're looking at. - The area is much smaller. On a 16x16px circular knob, I can get up to hundreds of steps which are clearly visually distinct. All of that being said, the article is quite bad as it contradicts itself, and uses knobs in ways they are not good at, which is circular interaction and being able to do multiple circles. It beats the point of having a knob, might as well have an interaction handler on the number indicator itself.
jeroenhd 1y ago
In just about every simulator featuring knobs, I've noticed that most knob interfaces will accept scroll wheel inputs. Use the literal knob in your mouse to control the knob on the screen. Of course Apple's mice don't have a physical knob, so that approach doesn't work, but knobs and mice can work outside of the Apple sphere. On touch screens, you can probably make them work by tapping the knob and popping up a slider to control the value. Lets you use knobs to maintain an overview while exposing usable controls for modifications.
- alehlopeh 1y ago
  I’m amazed you actually think that Apple’s mice don’t have any way to scroll. They have touch area where the scroll wheel would normally be, that works extremely well.
  - jeroenhd 1y ago
    It'll scroll (well, perform a swipe action, which usually translates into a scroll, except the wrong way around), but it's not the physical knob normal mice have. I also find the scroll response rather unpredictable. I usually love touch gestures, I'm even considering getting one of those Apple touchpads for my Linux machine, but the scroll area on the tiny curved mouse surface isn't intuitive to me.
nixpulvis 1y ago
I actually think knob inputs i.e. just the knob without vertical or horizontal modes, are quite useful. The ability to naturally gain precision the further out you drag is very handy and intuitive. Not good for computers with mouse inputs, but for touchscreens I like the idea.
- DonHopkins 1y ago
  >The ability to naturally gain precision the further out you drag is very handy and intuitive. Pie menus, where the selection is based on the gesture direction, allow you to move further out (longer gesture) to get more "leverage" or precise control over the angle (either continuous angle, or the selected slice). The angle selects a slice, but you can think of a knob as a pie menu with one slice (the whole pie) that also has a direction and a optional distance parameter. But you can even use the distance to exaggerate the angular precision even more! Here's a demo of a "Precision Pie Menu" I wrote in 1988 for NeWS in PostScript, which exaggerated that angular precision effect even more, once you pass a certain distance, allowing you to have extremely precise control over the angle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0scs59va4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0scs59va4c >Demo of the precision pie menu. Research performed by Don Hopkins under the direction of Mark Weiser and Ben Shneiderman. Developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins. >Transcript: This is a demonstration of the Precision Pie Menu under the NeWS window system. It's an experiment in exaggerating the extra precision that you get with distance. As you move out further from the menu center of a pie menu, normally the further you go from the center the more control you have over the angle. But if you want to input an exact number like an angle, you might want to get it down to the a certain number, but you run out of screen space before you get enough leverage to change the number to what you want. Now what happens here is that when you poke out, it makes a flexible lever, that the further out you go, the more flexible it becomes, and you have much finer control over the number. So as I move around back in and out, I'll poke it into a different place and just come out further to get a lot of leverage, and dial exactly the number I want. So here's what happens when you go around to the other side: "pop pop"! And as you get nearer it gets less and less flexible. Generally you'd kind of eyeball it, and then get it exact like 93, well there's 93 or 273, there's 273.

LoganDark 1y ago

Hmm, for alternatives, are you thinking of things like spinboxes? (I know them mainly from Blender)

MattPalmer1086 1y ago

Completely agree. They are very prevalent in DAWs and audio plugins, as they try to look like physical hardware. I absolutely hate interacting with them, either with touch or mouse. I guess the one advantage they have is they don't take up as much room as a slider, maybe?

bigyabai 1y ago
I tolerate knobs in DAWs/plugins... if they let you manually enter a value. So much fiddling can be skipped by dialing in a value directly. Without manual entry, you trap users in fiddly UI hell.
- dleeftink 1y ago
  When knobs are fiddly, most VST3s offer high-resolution midi mapping for precise automation. I agree through, that a precise readout is a must as the 'knob units' may not always map to what is displayed by the VST host.

hermitwriter 1y ago

Designing 3D real-world interactions for 2D screens is fun. Literally fun. Rarely useful.

sethwebster 1y ago
Yeah, the paradigms are just too different. I prefer sliders for knobs… just much more natural with a mouse or touchscreen.
- hermitwriter 1y ago
  It's hard to replicate the "coolness" factor though of a true studio control board. It begs to be touched and knobs beg to be turned...

Fraterkes 1y ago

The point of knobs is that you can fit a ton of sliders in a limited space, and that you can wildly adjust them with very little movement. Both are requirments for a lot of music software. What would the alternative be?

tobr 1y ago
You can do this with a normal slider as well. Map a large pointer movement to a small control movement.
- Fraterkes 1y ago
  I meant the opposite: with only a small mouse movement you can fling a knob wildly, which is great if you want to do a quick transition on eg a high pass filter or a low pass filter
dleeftink 1y ago
I think multi-zone drumpads on the recent Akai MPC Live 3 provide a good middle ground, quite similar to mapping various zones on a trackpad. The Macbook touchstrip was a cool (but maybe too cool) addition as well, similarly introduced by various DAW controllers (Push, Machine, MPC Live, others).
- Fraterkes 1y ago
  I meant that in the context of a digital ui, knobs are great because theyre a way to fit a finely-adjustable slider in a small area. In the physical world there’s obviously lots of alternatives
StopDisinfo910 1y ago
> What would the alternative be? Large slider which doesn’t change place, buttons to select what you are adjusting. Display the current value on the button if you need it to stay visible. The magic of software ux is that you can actually replace things on a screen in a way you can’t on a physical device.

Cockbrand 1y ago

Others have already pointed out that a knob saves a lot of space. And I'm surprised myself how usable a knob is when controlled with a vertical trackpad scroll gesture. Probably still a frustrating control on a touch screen, though.

duped 1y ago

If you've ever used pro audio software you come to love rotary over linear sliders. They're simply more flexible and dense when you have many parameters to tweak.

kowbell 1y ago
Linear sliders are also finite, while rotary encoders can spin forever.
- siriaan 1y ago
  In the physical world, sure, but there's no reason why a virtual linear slide could not be made endless
  - squeaky-clean 1y ago
    You'd have a discontinuity. A knob naturally rotates back to its start. A slider never does and would have to pacman-wrap itself back to the start. There's no motion you could make that would infinitely increase without a break. A knob you can just move your cursor in a clockwise circle infinitely.
- baxuz 1y ago
  Yeah but that doesn't have much value as you lose the value indicator. If you don't need a value indicator, you don't need a circular knob as an affordance. You can have a whatever as it just reacts to your input. If you do have a value indicator which is "infinite", such as a numerical value display, it's better to make it interactive and place the interaction on top of it, instead of splitting the UI between a value indicator and the input. A lot of software does this.

baxuz 1y ago

It's really not. You're looking at it the wrong way, and haven't come across any of the use cases it solves. If you have limited space and you need to both interact with and see fractional ranges, knobs are the way to go. It's way more glanceable, and the entire range is displayed in the knob itself. Think of it this way: Both a circular knob and a slider have 2 elements: the interactive area and the range display. However, the slide has the same knob size that is set on a large track displaying the selected range by moving the knob, whereas the circular knob has the track displayed radially inside it. For the track example — the knob is the only interactive element for all practical purposes when it comes to precise tweaking of values. Single clicks on a track usually don't support further dragging after the initial click on any OS or UI implementation. This comes with many positive sides: - The interactive area (handle) is always in the same place. - The interactive area is in practice always bigger than a knob on a linear slider. - Adjusting the knob doesn't reposition your cursor, no matter what you do with the mouse. - The circular track allows for much easier visual identification of fractions compared to a linear track due to its radial nature. - The indicator can be a single pixel, whereas on the linear track, the knob is a fairly imprecise blob due to its nature of needing to serve a dual purpose. This means it's a lot more precise. - There is a lot more granularity in the same surface area. - Interaction precision isn't limited to the size of the track where it needs to scale linearly - You don't need to dynamic element rendering or resizing which may cover other things you're looking at. - The area is much smaller. On a 16x16px circular knob, I can get up to hundreds of steps which are clearly visually distinct. All of that being said, the article is quite bad as it contradicts itself, and uses knobs in ways they are not good at, which is circular interaction and being able to do multiple circles. It beats the point of having a knob, might as well have an interaction handler on the number indicator itself.

jeroenhd 1y ago

In just about every simulator featuring knobs, I've noticed that most knob interfaces will accept scroll wheel inputs. Use the literal knob in your mouse to control the knob on the screen. Of course Apple's mice don't have a physical knob, so that approach doesn't work, but knobs and mice can work outside of the Apple sphere. On touch screens, you can probably make them work by tapping the knob and popping up a slider to control the value. Lets you use knobs to maintain an overview while exposing usable controls for modifications.

alehlopeh 1y ago
I’m amazed you actually think that Apple’s mice don’t have any way to scroll. They have touch area where the scroll wheel would normally be, that works extremely well.
- jeroenhd 1y ago
  It'll scroll (well, perform a swipe action, which usually translates into a scroll, except the wrong way around), but it's not the physical knob normal mice have. I also find the scroll response rather unpredictable. I usually love touch gestures, I'm even considering getting one of those Apple touchpads for my Linux machine, but the scroll area on the tiny curved mouse surface isn't intuitive to me.

nixpulvis 1y ago

I actually think knob inputs i.e. just the knob without vertical or horizontal modes, are quite useful. The ability to naturally gain precision the further out you drag is very handy and intuitive. Not good for computers with mouse inputs, but for touchscreens I like the idea.

DonHopkins 1y ago
>The ability to naturally gain precision the further out you drag is very handy and intuitive. Pie menus, where the selection is based on the gesture direction, allow you to move further out (longer gesture) to get more "leverage" or precise control over the angle (either continuous angle, or the selected slice). The angle selects a slice, but you can think of a knob as a pie menu with one slice (the whole pie) that also has a direction and a optional distance parameter. But you can even use the distance to exaggerate the angular precision even more! Here's a demo of a "Precision Pie Menu" I wrote in 1988 for NeWS in PostScript, which exaggerated that angular precision effect even more, once you pass a certain distance, allowing you to have extremely precise control over the angle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0scs59va4c https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0scs59va4c >Demo of the precision pie menu. Research performed by Don Hopkins under the direction of Mark Weiser and Ben Shneiderman. Developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins. >Transcript: This is a demonstration of the Precision Pie Menu under the NeWS window system. It's an experiment in exaggerating the extra precision that you get with distance. As you move out further from the menu center of a pie menu, normally the further you go from the center the more control you have over the angle. But if you want to input an exact number like an angle, you might want to get it down to the a certain number, but you run out of screen space before you get enough leverage to change the number to what you want. Now what happens here is that when you poke out, it makes a flexible lever, that the further out you go, the more flexible it becomes, and you have much finer control over the number. So as I move around back in and out, I'll poke it into a different place and just come out further to get a lot of leverage, and dial exactly the number I want. So here's what happens when you go around to the other side: "pop pop"! And as you get nearer it gets less and less flexible. Generally you'd kind of eyeball it, and then get it exact like 93, well there's 93 or 273, there's 273.