Re: [LAU] turn your tablet into a real physical interface

On Mon, 3 Nov 2014, Simon Wise wrote:

> it is the combination of real knobs and faders with the visual feed back of a
> touch screen for selecting and viewing things that works well ... it has been
> the basis of some very high end studio mixing systems for a while now. A

Even lower end digital mixers use this mix of interface, Yes it can be
very flexable. Adjusting EQ "Q" with two fingers, while at the same time
setting centre frequescy and level is nice.

> biggish button displayed on a touchsceen requires less fiddling/distraction
> than using a mouse and cursor if you are mostly using your hands for the
> keyboard and real controls ... plus there are some types of control that can
> be done with multi-touch or pen quite nicely ... (certainly not knobs, faders
> and buttons)

Using touch screen over mouse for those things that are on screen I like.
Using a touch ecreen to replace tactile level controls I am less sure
of... Though to be honest some of the very early versions I used to
control overall velocity on the Atari might have worked well with
touchscreens. They were not visual sliders or knobs, but a button/label
where clicking and holding while moving up or down adjusted level. While
moving up or down the mouse pointer may have been over some other control,
but so long as the mouse button was held down it did not matter. The only
visual feed back was the numeric value of the velocity offset changing.
Horizontal movement of the mouse was ignored. The only downside for this
becomes realestate. A control too close to the edge of the screen ends up
with a limited range of control... That is a control near the top is
limited to moving the level higher and a control near the bottom is
limited to how much lower it can go. Designing the display to use the
screen edges for display only use and putting controls towards screen
centre could help or defining up as up/right and down as down/left might
help too. Any of the ideas used on the Atari would work just as easy on
any GUI. In fact the same techniques are used in some software, what
brought it to mind was the control density was very high (to compensate
for the lower resolution of screens at the time). The quality of "rodents"
seems to have dropped since too... holding and dragging worked better
without mouse button skipps almost every mouse seems to develop very
quickly.

The idea of using the touch screen to select the control and then using a
knob/shuttle/joystick/trackball/mouse to change the value also makes a lot
of sense. Most of the digital mixers I have seen use both a large number
of real knobs/faders with selection to extend them.

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net
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