On Tue, Sep 07, 2010 at 07:20:10PM +0100, Gordon JC Pearce wrote: > This is going to stir up a bit of discussion! > > Rotary knob GUI elements - should you move the mouse in a circle to > operate them, or up and down? What about side to side?
The ones I'm using on some (unpublished ATM) apps and plugins do: * click, move either up or right to increment, left or down to decrement, or * use the mouse wheel, With shift pressed you get higher resolution. For some functions they also display a numerical value for a few seconds when touched. The important thing with rotary controls is that everything should be relative. Having the knob move intantly to a click position is more than useless, and in some cases quite dangerous. This is similar to the advantage of *real* rotary controls vs. linear ones. Try to control a linear fader while you're running from a riot police assault during a manifestation. Or under attack from a US helicopter mistaking your mic for a rocket launcher. The nice thing about rotary controls - both real and sofrware - is that they provide a very good quick visual indication of the current state, something a spinbox well never do, while linear controls require much more space. BTW, the main reason why mixers have linear faders is *space*. A really big rotary knob provides much better control than any linear fader. But it doesn't allow a for design with just a few centimeters per channel strip. So as mixer channel counts went up, the only solution was a linear fader. Ciao, -- FA There are three of them, and Alleline. _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-dev
