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 _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
