Jun 26

Experimental feature in 4.2 beta: increased precision of Dials and Sliders

Please check out the beta build 104 of Mela 4.2. I'm experimenting to see if the following change to the dial and sliders improves usability. If you move your finger by 64pt (128px on 2x retinas, 192px on 3x retinas) from a slider or a dial, it will go into fine mode. As you move your finger further from the dial or slider the parameter adjustment becomes finer. The precision amount could be tweaked further, I'll experiment some more and do some tests. Let me know if you find this useful and works ok for you.

Completed

Jul 19, 2023

Released in Mela 4.3 update.

Jul 11, 2023

**Build 120** This has been added back: - All dials now respond to only vertical gestures, including the intensity dials (the capsule-shaped ones). Let me know if this feels ok. - The further you move your finger from the dial or slider that you are adjusting finer the control will become.

Jul 11, 2023

Nikolozi: Just tested this out real quick. It feels great! Tried on dials, horizontal sliders, and vertical sliders.

Jul 12, 2023

tristan: Nice, I'm thinking switching intensity dials back to responding horizontal drag gesture. I was working on some music, and I realised the best way for these capsule-shaped dials is still horizontal drag in order not to obscure the parameter values that they are displaying.

Jun 29, 2023

Reverted the feature for now as it broke some behaviours. I'll bring it back in a future 4.x update, once it's more refined.

Jun 26, 2023

I'm liking this so far. It should reduce the need to manually enter values (although that's still really nice to have, especially when you need exact precision like 262.0Hz) There was some app I used to use where there was an additional visual cue that would show up when adjusting controls this way. Can't find it now or I would make a video. It was like a simple vector triangle that would get larger as you moved further from the control, with one vertex centered on the control, and the other two vertices oriented vertically above & below the finger, with that vertical side of the triangle representing the scaled range of control. Not sure if that's really helpful or necessary, but I remember thinking it looked cool.

Jun 27, 2023

Jon Diercks: yeah, I think manually entering values should always be there. Note also that even though values are displayed using 3 significant figures, it's usually rounded. e.g. you could enter 261.75Hz, it will display 262 but use 261.75 in DSP. So, I'm considering leaving it in the 4.2 release and if users complain I'll revert back in 4.3 and work on a better solution. > There was some app I used to use where there was an additional visual cue that would show up when adjusting controls this way. I think one of the Propellerheads' (now called Reason Studios) iOS synth apps had something like that. It would show a vertical line and would expand vertically further you went. Seem's like an ok idea, but don't have anything better, so I think it's not worth complicating it until we have a good solution. But yeah, generally a visual cue would be cool.

Jun 26, 2023

This is fixed in build 105. In addition, to make this feature easier to use, all dials now respond to only vertical gestures, except for the intensity dials (the capsule-shaped ones), which only respond to horizontal gestures.

Jun 26, 2023

looks like the broke dials with discrete values, e.g. LFO's Sync