Comment by ofalkaed
16 hours ago
Sure but if you need to resort to tricks to make it work are they really the right UI element for the job? Their being 1:1 is what makes these work. If you fill your UI with 20 pixel sliders which all cover .2khz to 20khz and use shift clicking or the like to make it work, it is going to get irritating rather quickly. 20 pixel knob will not be much better with such a wide range but has the advantage of being able to be used endlessly; one rotation per octave, it will still be a little irritating but a vast improvement.
shift-clicking isn't necessary. Your screen has a resolution higher than 20 pixels wide, doesn't it? Maybe your screen is 1280 pixels wide? Well that could be 1280 steps for a slider, or a knob. It's also a bit dependent on the resolution of the pointing device, too.
And 20 pixels wide on a modern screen is so tiny you would have trouble seeing it, so the whole premise of a "20 px knob" is blown. A slider with 100 pixels width would also be pretty small. The smallest I'd make it to work on a modern screen is at least 250 pixels wide. And that's plenty of resolution for most things. If a slider is more important, make it bigger, and you get more resolution.
Arguing about a 20 pixel knob or slider is kind of stupid considering how small that actually is in screen real estate. If the knob or slider is 20 pixels in any direction then you have other UX problems.
I am not arguing about a 20 pixel slider, not even arguing, that was just a random number which works just as well as any other number to demonstrate the problem and why knobs have their place despite having their own problems. Shift clicking was also just an example, one of the many tricks you can use, which is why I said "shift clicking or the like."
Doing things like 6 pixels of movement on the screen equal 1 pixel on the slider can cause problems with display scaling and will mean if you have sliders near the edge of the screen you will not be able to use jump on click and even then can be a headache.
It is an interesting topic and far from solved.