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Comment by jakear | Hacker News Reader

Love the "Antique Soviet Space Junk" collection, it'd awesome to see the full collection digitized - great resource for intuitive UI development.

Relatedly, I've recently been working on UI's inspired by the F-15 cockpit [1,2]. It's neat how on one hand the controls are amazingly complicated (Enough knobs and dials to fly a fighter jet! With 0 losses to boot!), but on the other hand you can get a pretty good sense of how everything operates just by reading the labels and diagrams painted atop them. The acronyms are a different story, but then that's what manuals and all those hours of training are for.

[1]: https://waltham.pages.dev, F-15's clock/timer element

[2]: https://solunar.pages.dev, tide charts based on F-15 UI elements. WIP, still gotta figure out how to render the location selection -- the soviet globe UI in the OP is quite interesting. For now set the url's hash to your favorite NOAA station's id if you're really interested :)

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On the subject of controls that don't translate well, Rotary knobs are great as a physical device, But they feel terrible as a mouse controlled item.

The biggest offenders are audio plugins, they tend to be very skeuomorphic, almost to a fault. I don't mind a little skeuomorphism, in fact I think it can help readability of the interface. But the way audio plugins take it to an extreme and cram as many rotary knobs in there as possible is maddening.

A well-designed digital rotary knob isn't too hard to use - but it must be set by simply dragging up and down, not in a rotary motion, which is very unnatural with a mouse. They remain popular in audio software not just because of skeuomorphism (though that doubtless plays a role) but because they are a space-efficient way of putting lots of controls on a page. Audio software is usually highly parametric, so that's important.

Even though I understand this need, I'm still very keen on audio software that tries to break out of the 'everything is a knob' paradigm when it makes sense.

Good point about converting linear motion to rotary for mouse users. I hadn't considered that as I only ever use touch screens and touch pads so to me the rotary is just fine (aka, touch the option you want).

That said, it's just a radio button, would you expect radio buttons to activate on scroll too? For continuous numeric inputs I modeled the slider, and enabled scroll control.

One issue there is intercepting horizontal scroll on touchpads is flakey and about two thirds of the time you go back instead of moving the thing right.

> That said, it's just a radio button, would you expect radio buttons to activate on scroll too?

If you represent it as a knob then it's not though. A knob is something you turn, scrolling is the natural way to approach that.

A digital knob shouldn't need any dragging nowadays with modern mice. Instead you should be able to just point to it and spin the scrollwheel. It's a rotary motion that feels somewhat analogous to spinning a physical knob with an easy physical transition from coarse-grained spin to fine-tuning adjustment.

a lot of audio stuff is designed with the expectation that you'll be binding the control to a MIDI controller if it's important, so in that sense the skeumorphism makes a lot of sense. if the VST knob is just a visual representation of something that's bound to another MIDI-bound knob in a DAW, it doesn't really matter if the mouse UX is bad, since it'll probably only be used briefly while dialing in settings, and then serve as a visual UX thing after

I think the earth thingie was one of these babies:

https://www.righto.com/2023/01/inside-globus-ink-mechanical-...

That's... gorgeous.

I get the urge to scroll it as if it was a trackball, though.

Could you could take design ideas from the F-15 cockpit and use them without being skeuomorphic? Would you end up with a UI of checkboxes and radio buttons? Or was the whole goal to make something that looks like physical cockpit control?

I think some aspects, like toggle controls, are not very common today. Some people might have no idea what they are.

The fun part in developing for myself is I don't have to care what "some people" don't know. :)

That said, I believe my toggles have a couple benefits: they're labeled on both sides, so it's more clear what the options are. And the change is immediately visible, again making the functionality more obvious. The "modern" toggle where a circle can be on either end of an elongated cylinder and a string of text is somewhere across the screen in a step down from that, IMO.

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