Comment by lights0123
5 years ago
Circular knobs in audio contexts that don't support circular mouse movement need to not exist. If you want to have the user drag their mouse up and down, just use a vertical slider.
5 years ago
Circular knobs in audio contexts that don't support circular mouse movement need to not exist. If you want to have the user drag their mouse up and down, just use a vertical slider.
Back in the kde 3 days, there was this applet called "knob" for volume control. For me personally, its circular knob UI is actually the best.
Firstly, you can place the applet at a corner of the panel, e.g. at the bottom right, such that you now have an infinitely large target [1] to hit.
Then, once you have the mouse pointer hovering above it, you can:
- scroll up/down to increase/decrease the volume
- middle click to toggle on/off the sound
For those who possess precise control of the mouse pointer, of course they can still click on an arbitrary spot on the knob to set the volume.
For bonus point, because it is a knob, you always know what is the current volume level. All that for maybe 40x40 pixels of screen real estate only.
[1] https://blog.codinghorror.com/fitts-law-and-infinite-width/
And for those of us on laptops with no mousewheel abs no middle button? Trying to make the mouse move in an arc …
Knobs are great in the physical world, never met one on a screen that wasn’t hard to use.
On laptop, supposedly the simplest thing to do is to use the dedicated volume keys?
Again, this was back in kde 3 days, where desktop usage was more prominent than laptop, and even on laptop, a mouse with a scroll wheel was still a common accessory since touchpad gesture wasn't really a thing yet.
> Knobs are great in the physical world, never met one on a screen that wasn’t hard to use.
Well, I just gave you a perfect example where a knob on the screen was immensely useful. Of course it will be silly to try copying the physical world as-is, but with a little bit of creativity, applied in the right context, a knob on the screen can absolutely be useful.
It comes down to space, a knob can represent more points than a slider for less screen space
Yeah but sometimes that same knob correllates with a knob on an actual piece of hardware, so maybe the design compromise was this instead of changing the UI on the fly