interface design: linear vs radial knobs

I can't recall the amount of flamewars I've had about this subject at the office, years and years ago.

I think radial mouse movement for 'twisting' a knob is silly. And yet, enough companies (mainly in audio) still have radial knobs.. ._.

Why it's silly?

- No one IRL twists a knob by walking around it while holding it between the fingers. (this equals radial mouse movement)
- You (most probably) twist a real knob between thumb and pointerfinger, both move in the opposite way, and linear!
- a real-life interface isn't the same as a computer interface, there's no reason why things should be 1:1 with real life.
- linear movement, in the end, is a lot more easy and practical!


Now, anyone who dares to defend the opposite? :P

Not me, it really bugged me in rebirth.
I like sliders.

*EDIT*

having just posted that, I've thought of one good reason for radial ones, they take up less space.

heh linear sliders prefered here too in apps. I like knobs on physical hardware though :)

I like the knobs in FL studio, it does save a lot of space.

It's not about space, it's how they are controlled. Linear or radial?

Eh, yeah, linear as in straight up and down. :)

linear in apps, knobs in reality. it's true that knobs save space in apps.

Linear horizontal; left is anticlockwise & right is clockwise.

Compact & intuitive...

Best of both worlds perhaps?

well, I was thinking something like this: http://pub.unreal64.net/boor/tspinner_.rar

(made with MaxGUI, windows)

To me, these spinners feel silky smooth and really have tons o' handy features! They are classic spinners really, but they have a property that tells them that another object will update the spinnercanvas, in this case it's a knob object that visualises the spinner. :)

But really, some ppl truly think you should move the mouse radially around them because it's a rotating object. No matter how hard I try, I just can't get it out of their head.

Bleh, who needs sliders, all I need is a good ol' text-input box.

I agree. Text input puts me in better control of what happens, and features copy and paste.

With a slider, there is no easy way to get it sitting dead centre or in precisely the same place as another one.

Here here. Text input. Has got the most acurracy of all!

Knobs are to easy to get it jumpy. Maybe to far, not far enough. Plus the wierd mouse movement.

Text input is accurate up to and above 2.14 Billionths
(rough max size of a floating point number ;) )

text input for me, hate it when i get 2.23 when i want 2.00 on the slider :-(

The text input box has the disadantage that it won't behave like a scrollbar or spinner, you can't 'change' it on the fly and hear or see any results/changing.

I've got a midi keyboard with real knobs for controlling my Reason takes ;)

Radial, as you can turn them infinite...

CS_TBL:

You need to rotate the mark only, and leave the skirt where it is, unless the lighting is meant to rotate with the knob! ;O)

I'd guess you want a transparent image over a backdrop of some kind. Upside is that it's then also less to move about so might be even smoother once things start gettting busy.

I do quite a lot of knob/lever/dial image rendering to a competent standard (see blog for an example), so if you get stuck for cute graphics, give me a yell, we could quite possibly strike up a helpful deal for us both I'd imagine.

It's just a povray thing, the skirt of that knob is just some granite pigment, as I wanted to accent the impression that something was rotating, other than the marker. Even the backdrop grey is part of the raytrace scene. :P

it's just a mere example to showcase my spinner..

I design VST GUIs and use Knob Render for all my knob animations. I couldn't manage without it.

http://www.otiumfx.com/knobrender.php

Here's a couple of GUIs I've done with Knob Render (first one is a bit old and was just for kicks, second was for a commercial VSTi):

www.strafed.net/stuff/nostalgia.jpg

www.strafed.net/stuff/randomax1.jpg

So at least you've an option*cough* opinion on the linear vs radial thing..?

Option? I'm guessing you mean opinion. I hate radial knob turning. It doesn't make sense to me. It's like making a character walk in a game by moving the mouse forward and backwards :).

Get an app that makes proper use of the mouse wheel, scroll-up to increase value with text-box in focus, down for decrease.

Which is what my example already does, + 10 memory locations ( 09 and shift-09) and pgup/dn/home support, and rightclick triggers a gadgetaction event. :P

The ones in fruity loops are radial but they work just like linear ones, you click on the knob and drag the mouse up or down. No problems there...

That's what I mean anyway.. any knob just returns a value from x to y, so technically every knob is a linear device, with the 'radial' I'm referring to the way one has to move the mouse.