> After using the knobs in Garageband for a while, I noticed that they didn’t always react the way I thought they would. Most of the time the little indicator dot on the knob would follow my finger as I spun the knob around in a circle. Other times the knob wouldn’t follow my finger at all and seemed to go in random directions. I eventually figured out that I had stumbled on three different ways to turn a virtual knob.
> ...
> Apple’s attention to detail is what has propelled it to be the most valuable company on earth. Whether it’s the click of a physical button or the math behind inertial scrolling, Apple employees work really hard to make products that are deceptively simple and just feel right. The virtual knobs found in Garageband are no exception and I hope others enjoyed learning about them as much as I have.
I think these two statements are contradictory. Personally, I've noticed a pattern when people post about Apple UX that seems to go "yes this thing may be unintuitive but actually it's a sign of really good design!" that I can't quite seem to wrap my head around
I think it's more that someone may assume how something works, and it isn't exactly that, so they say it's unintuitive. But there could be multiple assumptions on how it should work on first use. Covering all of those possibilities, and integrating them into a cohesive experience that works the first time, and makes even more sense as you continue to use it and learn the other ways to interact, shows a strong attention to detail and design.
This is opposed to something that may be very intuitive for 30% of people, but the other 70% are lost, and the implementation doesn't scale.
I think in UX there is general lack of desire to properly explain how stuff works instead of relying on just "guessing user expectations right"
like if said knob just displayed a vertical bar with marks signalling up and down also works it would be very clear to person that tried to just spin it
Hmm, may be you're right about UX designers not wanting to explain. For instance, I certainly won't want that vertical bar for aesthetic reasons. It's just hard to defend objectively.
Agreed. There's a lot of self blaming going on here. "Apple cares about users so much. They work sooo hard" .. but also when things don't work well, they don't seem to update their world view.
Its quite fascinating behavior really. Reality distortion field.
The problem of the knob is that it offers a large and precise control, but that large control remains invisible. There's no obvious clue showing that you can still interact with the knob by dragging the pointer / finger far away from it.
Adding a simple visual clue would help discoverablility a lot. Draw a faint halo on touch, when the mode changes. Draw a more visible trail when the touch point is dragged. Provide immediate and localized feedback, like good UX guidelines suggest.
author here - fair point but I still think apple made the right call even if it leads to a bit of confusion at first.
If a digital knob needs to be turned several times (e.g. 1080º, common in DAWs), the "default" way to interact with a knob on a touchscreen - circling again and again - is slow and uncomfortable. Adding "slider" gestures on top of the default behavior is a nice way to perform many turns quickly and easily.
In just about every simulator featuring knobs, I've noticed that most knob interfaces will accept scroll wheel inputs. Use the literal knob in your mouse to control the knob on the screen.
Of course Apple's mice don't have a physical knob, so that approach doesn't work, but knobs and mice can work outside of the Apple sphere.
On touch screens, you can probably make them work by tapping the knob and popping up a slider to control the value. Lets you use knobs to maintain an overview while exposing usable controls for modifications.
The point of knobs is that you can fit a ton of sliders in a limited space, and that you can wildly adjust them with very little movement. Both are requirments for a lot of music software. What would the alternative be?
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.
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.
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.
I think multi-zone drumpads on the recent Akai MPC Live 3 provide a good middle ground, quite similar to mapping various zones on a trackpad. The Macbook touchstrip was a cool (but maybe too cool) addition as well, similarly introduced by various DAW controllers (Push, Machine, MPC Live, others).
I meant that in the context of a digital ui, knobs are great because theyre a way to fit a finely-adjustable slider in a small area. In the physical world there’s obviously lots of alternatives
I meant the opposite: with only a small mouse movement you can fling a knob wildly, which is great if you want to do a quick transition on eg a high pass filter or a low pass filter
I actually think knob inputs i.e. just the knob without vertical or horizontal modes, are quite useful. The ability to naturally gain precision the further out you drag is very handy and intuitive.
Not good for computers with mouse inputs, but for touchscreens I like the idea.
>The ability to naturally gain precision the further out you drag is very handy and intuitive.
Pie menus, where the selection is based on the gesture direction, allow you to move further out (longer gesture) to get more "leverage" or precise control over the angle (either continuous angle, or the selected slice).
The angle selects a slice, but you can think of a knob as a pie menu with one slice (the whole pie) that also has a direction and a optional distance parameter.
But you can even use the distance to exaggerate the angular precision even more!
Here's a demo of a "Precision Pie Menu" I wrote in 1988 for NeWS in PostScript, which exaggerated that angular precision effect even more, once you pass a certain distance, allowing you to have extremely precise control over the angle.
>Demo of the precision pie menu. Research performed by Don Hopkins under the direction of Mark Weiser and Ben Shneiderman. Developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins.
>Transcript:
This is a demonstration of the Precision
Pie Menu under the NeWS window system.
It's an experiment in exaggerating the
extra precision that you get with
distance.
As you move out further from
the menu center of a pie menu, normally
the further you go from the center the
more control you have over the angle.
But if you want to input an exact number
like an angle, you might want to get it
down to the a certain number, but you run
out of screen space before you get
enough leverage to change the number to
what you want.
Now what happens here is
that when you poke out,
it makes a flexible lever, that the
further out you go, the more flexible it
becomes, and you have much finer control
over the number.
So as I move around back
in and out, I'll poke it into a different
place and just come out further to get a
lot of leverage, and dial exactly the
number I want.
So here's what happens when you go
around to the other side:
"pop pop"!
And as you get
nearer it gets less and less
flexible.
Generally you'd kind of eyeball
it, and then get it exact like 93, well
there's 93 or 273, there's 273.
Others have already pointed out that a knob saves a lot of space. And I'm surprised myself how usable a knob is when controlled with a vertical trackpad scroll gesture. Probably still a frustrating control on a touch screen, though.
Completely agree. They are very prevalent in DAWs and audio plugins, as they try to look like physical hardware. I absolutely hate interacting with them, either with touch or mouse.
I guess the one advantage they have is they don't take up as much room as a slider, maybe?
When knobs are fiddly, most VST3s offer high-resolution midi mapping for precise automation. I agree through, that a precise readout is a must as the 'knob units' may not always map to what is displayed by the VST host.
If you've ever used pro audio software you come to love rotary over linear sliders. They're simply more flexible and dense when you have many parameters to tweak.
Yeah but that doesn't have much value as you lose the value indicator.
If you don't need a value indicator, you don't need a circular knob as an affordance. You can have a whatever as it just reacts to your input.
If you do have a value indicator which is "infinite", such as a numerical value display, it's better to make it interactive and place the interaction on top of it, instead of splitting the UI between a value indicator and the input.
It's really not. You're looking at it the wrong way, and haven't come across any of the use cases it solves.
If you have limited space and you need to both interact with and see fractional ranges, knobs are the way to go. It's way more glanceable, and the entire range is displayed in the knob itself.
Think of it this way: Both a circular knob and a slider have 2 elements: the interactive area and the range display. However, the slide has the same knob size that is set on a large track displaying the selected range by moving the knob, whereas the circular knob has the track displayed radially inside it.
For the track example — the knob is the only interactive element for all practical purposes when it comes to precise tweaking of values. Single clicks on a track usually don't support further dragging after the initial click on any OS or UI implementation.
This comes with many positive sides:
- The interactive area (handle) is always in the same place.
- The interactive area is in practice always bigger than a knob on a linear slider.
- Adjusting the knob doesn't reposition your cursor, no matter what you do with the mouse.
- The circular track allows for much easier visual identification of fractions compared to a linear track due to its radial nature.
- The indicator can be a single pixel, whereas on the linear track, the knob is a fairly imprecise blob due to its nature of needing to serve a dual purpose. This means it's a lot more precise.
- There is a lot more granularity in the same surface area.
- Interaction precision isn't limited to the size of the track where it needs to scale linearly
- You don't need to dynamic element rendering or resizing which may cover other things you're looking at.
- The area is much smaller. On a 16x16px circular knob, I can get up to hundreds of steps which are clearly visually distinct.
All of that being said, the article is quite bad as it contradicts itself, and uses knobs in ways they are not good at, which is circular interaction and being able to do multiple circles. It beats the point of having a knob, might as well have an interaction handler on the number indicator itself.
This is not an Apple original design, this is standard fare in DAWs and VST plugins and has been since at least the early 00s. In the beginning of the article he talks about context menus as something that is not one GUI's but just standard in the industry - these knob interactions are like that for the audio industry.
I'm amused by the contrast between Apple's attention to detail on the implementation and their failure to recognize that a virtual knob with a touchscreen or mouse is a fundamentally bad idea.
The author also makes this error, praising Apple's design prowess and denigrating its competition while failing to recognize they "didn’t always react the way I thought they would" because they're ill-suited to the medium.
author here - I made this comment elsewhere, but I still think apple made the right call even if it leads to a bit of confusion at first.
As others have pointed out, sliders have limits & knobs don't, so I do think they have their place on touchscreens.
If a digital knob needs to be turned several times (e.g. 1080º, common in DAWs), the "default" way to interact with a knob on a touchscreen - circling again and again - is slow and uncomfortable. Adding "slider" gestures on top of the default behavior is a nice way to perform many turns quickly and easily.
I'm curious - what UI mechanism would you use instead?
"Make [a slider] bigger while the mouse button is held down, and warp the mouse so that when you let go you pick up where you left off" has been a solved problem for decades.
And with traditional toolkits (i.e. not HTML) it will even be fast.
I was able to debug and fix someone's MainStage patch last night over SMS when they sent me pictures of their screen, where all the knobs were visible.
Being able to see the full state of the thing is important. Hiding it behind interactions is just as bad as hiding it behind menus.
Sidenote, you have to do this on native because pointer lock/warp is not universally supported in web browsers.
You beat me to posting this. When this version of the QuickTime player came out, I couldn't understand how Apple of all companies could ship this obviously awkward control.
Edit: Scrolling further down on the article, I get reminded of the weird pop-out drawer at the bottom of the player. I had totally forgotten about it, and it was also a very awkward and un-ergonomic piece of UI.
This approach solves a common problem in apps that need to surface a lot of controls.
Problem 1: Sliders take up a lot of space.
Problem 2: Fine control of a mouse or touch-driven interface is provided by sliding, not by rotational gestures.
The idea here is to use a virtual knob to save space, while providing the fine control possible with a sliding interface. The sliding direction is generally chosen to be intuitive to the function of the knob. (Locking to horizontal or vertical also assists with fine control.)
Exactly. It's not about skeuomorphism, it's about saving space. Yes, it's unintuitive, and they could have made it work with a circular swipe as well, and probably should have, but it makes sense design-wise.
We don't steer automobiles with reins because new technologies work better with interfaces that match their technological properties. We've learned a lot about human computer interaction since the 1970's.
It's a fixed size slider which uses the rotation of the indicator to tell you its position, instead of the position of a thumb in horizontal or vertical position.
If you replaced it with text or a bar that filled the area it would be the same.
It's better than a linear sliders because it takes up less space. It's better than a bar slider because you have more range to display (the length of the arc of the indicator is longer than the horizontal and vertical dimensions). This in turn makes it better for putting into tighter spaces.
It gets very glitchy if the pointer/finger is near the centre of the knob. Really that area should be disabled or "worked around" somehow. The hard part is you can't stop the user's finger/pointer from crossing through the middle, like a physical knob does by its physical construction. So there's a mismatch there.
Having played a lot of MSFS 2020/2024 recently, I feel like I can appreciate this way more now. Since they have to make these knobs realistically and in 3D, when using them with a keyboard and mouse (or even worse a controller) it’s incredibly difficult to see and turn them. It gets even worse since you can push and pull many of these knobs (the difference being potentially catastrophic as well).
Pretty interesting- on the first knob (with vertical and horizontal disabled) works great with how I thought the horizontal and vertical gestures were supposed to work - the difference being I did them on the edges instead of the center.
I found this knob to be the best experience.
Curious if others feel strongly for the centered experience.
Ironically, this post perfectly demonstrates up why these gestures should not be used together. I could not reliably make it trigger one vs. the other and which mode it selects is not something the code can detect without continued input which will lead to discontinuities in value.
The one called garage band synth knob with 17 images is available as MF-A01 in real life. But beware there are 2 versions with same model number get the one with the set screw and brass bushing.
I didn't read the writeup. The result was pretty gnarly. The active area on a phone left me scrolling up and down and I had to go very slow once I got purchase on the knob or it would rotate back after a quarter turn.
> After using the knobs in Garageband for a while, I noticed that they didn’t always react the way I thought they would. Most of the time the little indicator dot on the knob would follow my finger as I spun the knob around in a circle. Other times the knob wouldn’t follow my finger at all and seemed to go in random directions. I eventually figured out that I had stumbled on three different ways to turn a virtual knob.
> ...
> Apple’s attention to detail is what has propelled it to be the most valuable company on earth. Whether it’s the click of a physical button or the math behind inertial scrolling, Apple employees work really hard to make products that are deceptively simple and just feel right. The virtual knobs found in Garageband are no exception and I hope others enjoyed learning about them as much as I have.
I think these two statements are contradictory. Personally, I've noticed a pattern when people post about Apple UX that seems to go "yes this thing may be unintuitive but actually it's a sign of really good design!" that I can't quite seem to wrap my head around
I think it's more that someone may assume how something works, and it isn't exactly that, so they say it's unintuitive. But there could be multiple assumptions on how it should work on first use. Covering all of those possibilities, and integrating them into a cohesive experience that works the first time, and makes even more sense as you continue to use it and learn the other ways to interact, shows a strong attention to detail and design.
This is opposed to something that may be very intuitive for 30% of people, but the other 70% are lost, and the implementation doesn't scale.
I think in UX there is general lack of desire to properly explain how stuff works instead of relying on just "guessing user expectations right"
like if said knob just displayed a vertical bar with marks signalling up and down also works it would be very clear to person that tried to just spin it
Hmm, may be you're right about UX designers not wanting to explain. For instance, I certainly won't want that vertical bar for aesthetic reasons. It's just hard to defend objectively.
Agreed. There's a lot of self blaming going on here. "Apple cares about users so much. They work sooo hard" .. but also when things don't work well, they don't seem to update their world view.
Its quite fascinating behavior really. Reality distortion field.
The problem of the knob is that it offers a large and precise control, but that large control remains invisible. There's no obvious clue showing that you can still interact with the knob by dragging the pointer / finger far away from it.
Adding a simple visual clue would help discoverablility a lot. Draw a faint halo on touch, when the mode changes. Draw a more visible trail when the touch point is dragged. Provide immediate and localized feedback, like good UX guidelines suggest.
author here - fair point but I still think apple made the right call even if it leads to a bit of confusion at first.
If a digital knob needs to be turned several times (e.g. 1080º, common in DAWs), the "default" way to interact with a knob on a touchscreen - circling again and again - is slow and uncomfortable. Adding "slider" gestures on top of the default behavior is a nice way to perform many turns quickly and easily.
The whole idea of knob is stupid both on touch screens as well as desktop. There are other good alternatives which are far more intuitive than knobs.
Knobs are good when you can physically rotate them like for example in a car. But there we are removing knobs and adding touchscreens.
In just about every simulator featuring knobs, I've noticed that most knob interfaces will accept scroll wheel inputs. Use the literal knob in your mouse to control the knob on the screen.
Of course Apple's mice don't have a physical knob, so that approach doesn't work, but knobs and mice can work outside of the Apple sphere.
On touch screens, you can probably make them work by tapping the knob and popping up a slider to control the value. Lets you use knobs to maintain an overview while exposing usable controls for modifications.
The point of knobs is that you can fit a ton of sliders in a limited space, and that you can wildly adjust them with very little movement. Both are requirments for a lot of music software. What would the alternative be?
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.
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.
I think it would be a pop-up that only appears while you're dragging it. It would basically just be showing the interaction mode explicitly.
> 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.
Then you can’t see the value at a glance though.
I think multi-zone drumpads on the recent Akai MPC Live 3 provide a good middle ground, quite similar to mapping various zones on a trackpad. The Macbook touchstrip was a cool (but maybe too cool) addition as well, similarly introduced by various DAW controllers (Push, Machine, MPC Live, others).
I meant that in the context of a digital ui, knobs are great because theyre a way to fit a finely-adjustable slider in a small area. In the physical world there’s obviously lots of alternatives
You can do this with a normal slider as well. Map a large pointer movement to a small control movement.
I meant the opposite: with only a small mouse movement you can fling a knob wildly, which is great if you want to do a quick transition on eg a high pass filter or a low pass filter
Designing 3D real-world interactions for 2D screens is fun. Literally fun. Rarely useful.
Yeah, the paradigms are just too different.
I prefer sliders for knobs… just much more natural with a mouse or touchscreen.
It's hard to replicate the "coolness" factor though of a true studio control board. It begs to be touched and knobs beg to be turned...
I actually think knob inputs i.e. just the knob without vertical or horizontal modes, are quite useful. The ability to naturally gain precision the further out you drag is very handy and intuitive.
Not good for computers with mouse inputs, but for touchscreens I like the idea.
>The ability to naturally gain precision the further out you drag is very handy and intuitive.
Pie menus, where the selection is based on the gesture direction, allow you to move further out (longer gesture) to get more "leverage" or precise control over the angle (either continuous angle, or the selected slice).
The angle selects a slice, but you can think of a knob as a pie menu with one slice (the whole pie) that also has a direction and a optional distance parameter.
But you can even use the distance to exaggerate the angular precision even more!
Here's a demo of a "Precision Pie Menu" I wrote in 1988 for NeWS in PostScript, which exaggerated that angular precision effect even more, once you pass a certain distance, allowing you to have extremely precise control over the angle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0scs59va4c
>Demo of the precision pie menu. Research performed by Don Hopkins under the direction of Mark Weiser and Ben Shneiderman. Developed and demonstrated by Don Hopkins.
>Transcript:
This is a demonstration of the Precision Pie Menu under the NeWS window system.
It's an experiment in exaggerating the extra precision that you get with distance.
As you move out further from the menu center of a pie menu, normally the further you go from the center the more control you have over the angle.
But if you want to input an exact number like an angle, you might want to get it down to the a certain number, but you run out of screen space before you get enough leverage to change the number to what you want.
Now what happens here is that when you poke out, it makes a flexible lever, that the further out you go, the more flexible it becomes, and you have much finer control over the number.
So as I move around back in and out, I'll poke it into a different place and just come out further to get a lot of leverage, and dial exactly the number I want.
So here's what happens when you go around to the other side: "pop pop"!
And as you get nearer it gets less and less flexible.
Generally you'd kind of eyeball it, and then get it exact like 93, well there's 93 or 273, there's 273.
Others have already pointed out that a knob saves a lot of space. And I'm surprised myself how usable a knob is when controlled with a vertical trackpad scroll gesture. Probably still a frustrating control on a touch screen, though.
Completely agree. They are very prevalent in DAWs and audio plugins, as they try to look like physical hardware. I absolutely hate interacting with them, either with touch or mouse.
I guess the one advantage they have is they don't take up as much room as a slider, maybe?
I tolerate knobs in DAWs/plugins... if they let you manually enter a value. So much fiddling can be skipped by dialing in a value directly.
Without manual entry, you trap users in fiddly UI hell.
When knobs are fiddly, most VST3s offer high-resolution midi mapping for precise automation. I agree through, that a precise readout is a must as the 'knob units' may not always map to what is displayed by the VST host.
If you've ever used pro audio software you come to love rotary over linear sliders. They're simply more flexible and dense when you have many parameters to tweak.
Linear sliders are also finite, while rotary encoders can spin forever.
In the physical world, sure, but there's no reason why a virtual linear slide could not be made endless
Yeah but that doesn't have much value as you lose the value indicator.
If you don't need a value indicator, you don't need a circular knob as an affordance. You can have a whatever as it just reacts to your input.
If you do have a value indicator which is "infinite", such as a numerical value display, it's better to make it interactive and place the interaction on top of it, instead of splitting the UI between a value indicator and the input.
A lot of software does this.
It's really not. You're looking at it the wrong way, and haven't come across any of the use cases it solves.
If you have limited space and you need to both interact with and see fractional ranges, knobs are the way to go. It's way more glanceable, and the entire range is displayed in the knob itself.
Think of it this way: Both a circular knob and a slider have 2 elements: the interactive area and the range display. However, the slide has the same knob size that is set on a large track displaying the selected range by moving the knob, whereas the circular knob has the track displayed radially inside it.
For the track example — the knob is the only interactive element for all practical purposes when it comes to precise tweaking of values. Single clicks on a track usually don't support further dragging after the initial click on any OS or UI implementation.
This comes with many positive sides:
- The interactive area (handle) is always in the same place.
- The interactive area is in practice always bigger than a knob on a linear slider.
- Adjusting the knob doesn't reposition your cursor, no matter what you do with the mouse.
- The circular track allows for much easier visual identification of fractions compared to a linear track due to its radial nature.
- The indicator can be a single pixel, whereas on the linear track, the knob is a fairly imprecise blob due to its nature of needing to serve a dual purpose. This means it's a lot more precise.
- There is a lot more granularity in the same surface area.
- Interaction precision isn't limited to the size of the track where it needs to scale linearly
- You don't need to dynamic element rendering or resizing which may cover other things you're looking at.
- The area is much smaller. On a 16x16px circular knob, I can get up to hundreds of steps which are clearly visually distinct.
All of that being said, the article is quite bad as it contradicts itself, and uses knobs in ways they are not good at, which is circular interaction and being able to do multiple circles. It beats the point of having a knob, might as well have an interaction handler on the number indicator itself.
Hmm, for alternatives, are you thinking of things like spinboxes? (I know them mainly from Blender)
This is not an Apple original design, this is standard fare in DAWs and VST plugins and has been since at least the early 00s. In the beginning of the article he talks about context menus as something that is not one GUI's but just standard in the industry - these knob interactions are like that for the audio industry.
author here - I was specifically talking about digital knobs on touch screens having both spin gestures AND horizontal/vertical slide gestures.
If you can point me to a DAW besides Garageband on iPad which was on a touchscreen with those three gestures I would love to try it out!
I'm amused by the contrast between Apple's attention to detail on the implementation and their failure to recognize that a virtual knob with a touchscreen or mouse is a fundamentally bad idea.
The author also makes this error, praising Apple's design prowess and denigrating its competition while failing to recognize they "didn’t always react the way I thought they would" because they're ill-suited to the medium.
author here - I made this comment elsewhere, but I still think apple made the right call even if it leads to a bit of confusion at first.
As others have pointed out, sliders have limits & knobs don't, so I do think they have their place on touchscreens.
If a digital knob needs to be turned several times (e.g. 1080º, common in DAWs), the "default" way to interact with a knob on a touchscreen - circling again and again - is slow and uncomfortable. Adding "slider" gestures on top of the default behavior is a nice way to perform many turns quickly and easily.
I'm curious - what UI mechanism would you use instead?
Literally every DAW has knobs everywhere: it would be impossible to use sliders everywhere in a DAW's UI, there simply isn't enough room.
"Make [a slider] bigger while the mouse button is held down, and warp the mouse so that when you let go you pick up where you left off" has been a solved problem for decades.
And with traditional toolkits (i.e. not HTML) it will even be fast.
This would be a few lines of CSS and it would be very fast
It's not all about the interaction, but also the visual representation which can be much finer and granular in small spaces with a knob.
I can make a 16x16px knob where you can see almost the entire 320° of the range.
It's also easier to see fractions, such as 1/2, 1/3 or 1/4.
Sliders, especially in 16px possess none of those.
I was able to debug and fix someone's MainStage patch last night over SMS when they sent me pictures of their screen, where all the knobs were visible.
Being able to see the full state of the thing is important. Hiding it behind interactions is just as bad as hiding it behind menus.
Sidenote, you have to do this on native because pointer lock/warp is not universally supported in web browsers.
As someone who regularly uses DAWs, this sounds like terrible UX
was going to say, heaven forbid we use a little skeumorphism
QuickTime use to have a wheel as a volume control.
It’s was a pain to use and they later dropped it for a slider.
http://hallofshame.gp.co.at/qtime.htm
You beat me to posting this. When this version of the QuickTime player came out, I couldn't understand how Apple of all companies could ship this obviously awkward control.
Edit: Scrolling further down on the article, I get reminded of the weird pop-out drawer at the bottom of the player. I had totally forgotten about it, and it was also a very awkward and un-ergonomic piece of UI.
Huh, the knob turns back when you attempt to turn it circularly (the most intuitive gesture).
How difficult can it be to make a knob that works when turned both linearly and circularly?
Came here to say that. They over-engineered it in a way that killed the only truly intuitive way to interact with a knob.
Up and down virtual knobs are entirely unintuitive to me.
I understand the rationalization, but a knob is not a slider and what's the point of non-skeuomorphic skeuomorphism?
This approach solves a common problem in apps that need to surface a lot of controls.
Problem 1: Sliders take up a lot of space.
Problem 2: Fine control of a mouse or touch-driven interface is provided by sliding, not by rotational gestures.
The idea here is to use a virtual knob to save space, while providing the fine control possible with a sliding interface. The sliding direction is generally chosen to be intuitive to the function of the knob. (Locking to horizontal or vertical also assists with fine control.)
Using a knob when using a knob doesn't solve the problem is poor design...then again, skeuomorphism is usually bad design.
Here a counter that increases and decreases with mouse movement would take less space and be more intuitive.
And a much much better design because it would provide a numerical readout of the value directly at the point of interaction.
But in fairness, most design is bad because designers tend toward satisfying themselves rather than users...ok, I will stop ranting now.
A counter provides more information but takes longer to read and appreciate than a simple angular magnitude.
Exactly. It's not about skeuomorphism, it's about saving space. Yes, it's unintuitive, and they could have made it work with a circular swipe as well, and probably should have, but it makes sense design-wise.
It's quite common in DAWs, it allows you to adjust knobs quite easily with a mouse.
It's a visually more compact interface element, but still allows the same simple interaction as a slider?
We don't steer automobiles with reins because new technologies work better with interfaces that match their technological properties. We've learned a lot about human computer interaction since the 1970's.
It's a fixed size slider which uses the rotation of the indicator to tell you its position, instead of the position of a thumb in horizontal or vertical position.
If you replaced it with text or a bar that filled the area it would be the same.
It's better than a linear sliders because it takes up less space. It's better than a bar slider because you have more range to display (the length of the arc of the indicator is longer than the horizontal and vertical dimensions). This in turn makes it better for putting into tighter spaces.
It gets very glitchy if the pointer/finger is near the centre of the knob. Really that area should be disabled or "worked around" somehow. The hard part is you can't stop the user's finger/pointer from crossing through the middle, like a physical knob does by its physical construction. So there's a mismatch there.
Having played a lot of MSFS 2020/2024 recently, I feel like I can appreciate this way more now. Since they have to make these knobs realistically and in 3D, when using them with a keyboard and mouse (or even worse a controller) it’s incredibly difficult to see and turn them. It gets even worse since you can push and pull many of these knobs (the difference being potentially catastrophic as well).
Interesting. I could imagine a knob not being so bad with a controller. But maybe I’m miss-imagining or maybe they implemented it poorly.
Pretty interesting- on the first knob (with vertical and horizontal disabled) works great with how I thought the horizontal and vertical gestures were supposed to work - the difference being I did them on the edges instead of the center.
I found this knob to be the best experience.
Curious if others feel strongly for the centered experience.
Ironically, this post perfectly demonstrates up why these gestures should not be used together. I could not reliably make it trigger one vs. the other and which mode it selects is not something the code can detect without continued input which will lead to discontinuities in value.
The one called garage band synth knob with 17 images is available as MF-A01 in real life. But beware there are 2 versions with same model number get the one with the set screw and brass bushing.
oh wow this is my article! wild to see it pick up traction after 13 years.
I guess I should probably publish more of my drafts...
Thanks for reading/commenting!
I don't know who they think they are fooling but these are all garbage. Jerky and frustrating to use, same as always.
fanboys are out of this world.
i can guarantee the only reason there's 3 input types for the knobs, is because three different teams did their own thing and nobody cares.
I didn't read the writeup. The result was pretty gnarly. The active area on a phone left me scrolling up and down and I had to go very slow once I got purchase on the knob or it would rotate back after a quarter turn.
Please no.
Agree. Makes sense for a mouse cursor but not touch.