Subject: [linux-audio-dev] Virtual Sliders Considered Harmful
From: eli+@gs211.sp.cs.cmu.edu
Date: Thu May 25 2000 - 22:04:32 EEST
On-screen knobs and sliders make me ill. They make me toss in my
sleep and pull out my eyebrow hairs. They are the bastard demon
children of real knobs and sliders. Shun them. Turning a knob with a
mouse is like poking it with a long stick.
I can control four sliders independently, or two knobs; the knobs give
repeatable absolute position. On-screen I can control one slider or
zero knobs: knobs are uncontrollable on screen. (I can't keep the
mouse pointer on a circular track around the knob center and listen to
the sound at the same time.) On a virtual devices the value I need
will lie in between two pixels; the real ones can be nudged with great
precision.
You know what I want that digital can give me? Boxes to type numbers
into. Boxes give me range, and they give me precise relations between
quantities. Sliders and knobs are a unary encoding; who needs that pain?
Continuous real-time control is a good thing, and fake sliders are
sometimes a satisfactory way to get it. I'd like to see other
approaches too.
* Bind a text box and a slider; if you like, toggle between
displaying each.
* Detach view from control. The slider may be short and vertical,
but I can control it with a long horizontal motion.
* Have mouse position control the time derivative of slider position.
* Give the slider ranges; make it controllable from coarse to fine.
* Make the damn thing log-taper or audio-taper or whatever if that's
what it wants to be.
* Let me pick two sliders and control them X-Y with the mouse.
--
Eli Brandt | eli+@cs.cmu.edu | http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/
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