Comment by robotresearcher 2 days ago
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.
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.
The difference with the Apple knob is that you would be given a strong cue for what to do after you tap on the knob. The current knob design has no cue until you press and slide, when you see a value change. But you have to do it right before you get any cue. Real knobs are turned; not tapped, pressed or slid. The slider shows you an affordance that works. The knob shows you an affordance that does not.
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.