Comment by StopDisinfo910
2 days ago
> 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.
There is absolutely no way you successfully adjust two knobs at the same time on a multitouch display, let alone while doing live music. They are barely usable one by one.
There is a reason people serious about doing music keep using physical knobs to change values in their software. I’m entirely convinced the sole reason DAWs use virtual knobs despite them being such a poor UX element is because people will map them to MIDI knobs anyway and that keeps the software and physical world looking the same.
> There is absolutely no way you successfully adjust two knobs at the same time on a multitouch display, let alone while doing live music
I do it all the time on an iPad. It handles up to 5 simultaneous controls very well.
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Kind of a self fulfilling prophecy then. I had to figure out how to map the knobs to MIDI hardware because it was so hard to adjust them on screen!
At that point I guess the physical resemblance is a virtue.
Then you can’t see the value at a glance though.