Comment by pjettter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pjettter | Hacker News Reader

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I often wish we had more analog control in the digital world. I wish there were turn knobs instead up/down buttons with 10 steps (where it is easy to accidentally leave a menu... When trying to get back to where you were, you are suddenly adjusting something else entirely). Manual control with digital devices has become too digital and too cumbersome.

It used to be easy to adjust contrast and brightness on a display, volume on an amplifiee, an analog TV, a termostat, a car radio, etc.

I realize that we are not really on course (yet?) for reintroducing a lot of analog controls, but in the end, our world is analog. Input is analog via speech, muscle motion, etc. Output is analog, via light and other vibrations that reach our senses. Why isn't control more analog? It's probably a cost thing.

I would totally buy a display or a laptop with analog controls. I don't even care if the turn dial actually has 16M steps, so long as the response is pretty much immediate and feels like a real potentiometer. It should feel like direct manipulation and like you're in control, instead of these digital roundabout abominations.

As to the subject, I imagine having some knobs that I can adjust under different circumstances to quickly vary intensity or cycle through alternatives in order to make things more readable or audible.

90% Of what we do is in the browser today. Browsers could have an "accessibility" API such that turn knobs (bluetooth? whatever) could be used for control. Like scroll wheels but on steroids?

And when you finally have a along controls everything is overloaded.

Dish forced a new remote on us last time a device broke and they replaced it. It has far fewer buttons. I’m sure it helps getting familiar with it on a super basic level. But the old one wasn’t that complicated anyhow.

But here’s the kicker: there’s no fast forward or rewind buttons. There no stop button. No record button. All of these (and more) have been turned into menu items and/or secret chords on the remote.

Oh. And it has a mic on it too. Hard pass.

Tv remote is just the easy example. I see it all over the place. Sleek no longer is pretty to my eyes. If I see something that I have to interact with these days and it looks sleek, I see frustration.

The worst offender of this is the Apple TV remote. Most of my actions with the Apple TV remote have been unintentional.

Makes me think of the "MacBook Wheel" [0] from ages past.

It's really a shame how user-hostile design can be.

[0] https://youtu.be/9BnLbv6QYcA?feature=shared

Haha! I haven’t seen anything from the onion in years. They kind of became irrelevant at some point :)

Apple TV remotes have always been so awful.

I remember when Front Row for the Mac was announced. I loved Front Row (although the supported content was far too limited).

But despite Fromt Row’s limited functionality and simplistic interface, the Apple Remote still didn’t feel adequate.

I just got an Apple TV and got crazy with the unintentional swipes and touches. Then I discovered you can turn that off, to click-only. It‘s much better now, maybe that helps you too.

The reverse of that is the 4-in-one replacement remote with it's bazillion buttons.

It's like a 747 cockpit.

At least everything is in a designated place!

That’s another thing I like about the analog world.

Yes direkt a 1:1 mapping of an analog (button/knob) would work better than what you describe.

Multifunction buttons… that never existed in the analog world? Or is that what is called “mode”? Send vs receive etc. Does anyone have a concrete example?

I’m not a remote control designer but I would think it would be fun to give it a try! Maybe I will :)

Most plugins used in music software do take that approach. Where the plugin interfaces are modelled to look 'like hardware' in most cases, with nobs, sliders, all the things you'd expect on a hardware compressor / synth etc.

I like it.

Even better, I connect a midi keyboard so I can use its knobs and faders to manipulate the plugins. Much better feel, and for something like eq, it's nice to be able to manipulate multiple things at once

“…it's nice to be able to manipulate multiple things at once.”

Particularly if one thing affects another in a ripple-effect or chain reaction. It is great to be able to adjust at least two values at once. Keeps you from going back-and-forth adjusting in ever smaller increments to get to the settings you want.

Knobs on a mouse UI suck

Not this in this use case, in fact quite the opposite.

generally most want to have a knob they can adjust and not worry about the underlying value. It's in line with the philosophy of tweaking settings and not using your eyes to judge if its in the right position.

Halleluja!

The dressing up of digital controls to mimic analog controls is called skeuomorphic although I have not encountered the term in a long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph

Yes, the “digital version” that mimics the analog one. It was cute in the mid 90’s.

I want actual physical knobs.not sure what that would be called. Potentiometers?

Rotary encoders, I think.

But then you have to “draw circles” with your mouse?

The UI usually maps linear motion quite naturally. In real use the control is mapped to a physical knob via MIDI, if you'll be tweaking it on the fly.

No. There are so many plugins and so many knobs that you will never have enough MIDI control panels and time to set them up.

I wanted to learn Ableton and have determined that it,s futile unless I get a MIDI controller

Absolutely untrue, but a MIDI keyboard will certainly improve the experience.

I hope you see this, just noticed your reply! Thanks for the encouragement, music production/DJing is something I really want to get into, so encouragement is extremely welcome. :) My problem when I tried using it was that the knobs were really difficult to adjust with my mouse, like it didn’t feel responsive. Am I doing something wrong?

It seems we are so amazingly primitive that we still think touch screens are a pretty neat idea for anything. But I’m sure analog controls will come back at some time in the future: First in really expensive cars, as expression of luxury. Only cheap cars will still have the cheap touch screens. Slowly, the old new way of interaction will trickle down to anything else. Like it went for the digital watch, ubiquitous for a short time, then a return to analog. Although those Casios seem to have a retro-retro comeback lately. I think even real keyboards might be a cool feature of future high-end smartphones.

I mean, for most things a touchscreen is pretty much the ultimate human interface — we are fundamentally hand-based creatures and the ability to re-render the same glasspane into a controller for anything is still magic.

There are of course things where more specialized inputs are required, but for the rest, touchscreens are here to stay*

* One improvement I would like to see it about their surface — we can no longer blind type on phones, because we can’t feel the borders of the buttons - but I think we have the tech to dynamically make the screen’s surface rougher/smoother. Another idea is to bring back 3D touch (and potentially improve on that - maybe it could even take some 3D vector as input?)

> It seems we are so amazingly primitive that we still think touch screens are a pretty neat idea for anything.

That looks familiar somehow... How many leaves should I pay you for this insight?

This is actually one of the things I love about my Mini Cooper; they have cool physical toggle switches that feel like you're in a cockpit instead of the all-digital interfaces that feel like a coffee bar.

My 2014 GLK is like this. Mostly, somewhat. Not getting anything newer until they figure it out!

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