Comment by quaintdev
2 days ago
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
> 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.
Then you can only adjust one thing at a time—so you’ve just created the worst of both worlds with a multi-touch display and live music software.
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Then you can’t see the value at a glance though.
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How about a knob that instantly overlays a slider when you touch it?
Then it takes only knob space at rest, but offers the slider affordance and high-res control when you need it.
Maybe that would work if it popped up VERY FAST. I have never gotten along with touch screen knobs.
Some of the music production UIs seem to feature huge grids of knobs, a pop-up slider would inherently obscure some of the adjacent knobs in some way, requiring you to move the cursor away or click somewhere else to dismiss it. It would create friction if you needed to do quick adjustments across a row or column of knobs.
I think the best compromise is something that's already very similar to knobs - a "draggable text field". Different software styles this element differently, but the essence is that it's a number, where you can either click and type a new value in, or hold the mouse on the field and drag it left or right to drag through the different values. You can find this in some video and 3D editors. Sometimes these elements are styled to have arrows on the sides of the numeric value to suggest the dragging behavior.
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That's effectively the same as the Apple knob modes where you can drag vertically or horizontally, except the visual slider would be locked to one orientation.
There are some music software that do this, and it looks clunky shifting between a graphic of a slider when you're moving it and a graphic of a knob when you're not.
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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).
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
Look at the how timers are adjusted in the Clock app on iPhone. Three rotary tumblers that can all be set independently.
You can do this with a normal slider as well. Map a large pointer movement to a small control movement.
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
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.
Designing 3D real-world interactions for 2D screens is fun. Literally fun. Rarely useful.
Yeah, the paradigms are just too different.
I prefer sliders for knobs… just much more natural with a mouse or touchscreen.
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...
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.
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.
Linear sliders are also finite, while rotary encoders can spin forever.
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.
In the physical world, sure, but there's no reason why a virtual linear slide could not be made endless
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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?
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.
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.
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.
>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
>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.
Hmm, for alternatives, are you thinking of things like spinboxes? (I know them mainly from Blender)