The grid actually already has a fair number of (non-software) circular dependencies. This is why they have black start [1] procedures and run drills of those procedures. Or should, at least; there have been high profile outages recently that have exposed holes in these plans [2].
Thanks! With respect tothe transtion I think everyones case is different. On my case, I am not an entrepeneur, I didn't aspire to create a company and it wasn't my intentions to make money out of IronCalc. I thought it was a missing piece in our current tech stack and turn out that many other people were interested.
Firs I got a grant from the nlNet[1]. That wasn't enough for me to live of but paved the way to what was coming. Many different companies took an interest and I started havin emails from different folks about how to integrate IronCalc. Some of them were happy to spend some money on it, but I couldn't take it because of my day job. Goverments got interested (!) [2]. I realized there might be ways for me to have a modest living and push the vission I have for IronCalc for another two years.
There are many things I could say on the topic, if you like to chat feel free to send me an email. I'm always happy to help
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.
It'll scroll (well, perform a swipe action, which usually translates into a scroll, except the wrong way around), but it's not the physical knob normal mice have.
I also find the scroll response rather unpredictable. I usually love touch gestures, I'm even considering getting one of those Apple touchpads for my Linux machine, but the scroll area on the tiny curved mouse surface isn't intuitive to me.
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?
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.
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.
That's effectively the same as the Apple knob modes where you can drag vertically or horizontally, except the visual slider would be locked to one orientation.
There are some music software that do this, and it looks clunky shifting between a graphic of a slider when you're moving it and a graphic of a knob when you're not.
The difference with the Apple knob is that you would be given a strong cue for what to do after you tap on the knob. The current knob design has no cue until you press and slide, when you see a value change. But you have to do it right before you get any cue. Real knobs are turned; not tapped, pressed or slid. The slider shows you an affordance that works. The knob shows you an affordance that does not.
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
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.
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.
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.
You'd have a discontinuity. A knob naturally rotates back to its start. A slider never does and would have to pacman-wrap itself back to the start.
There's no motion you could make that would infinitely increase without a break. A knob you can just move your cursor in a clockwise circle infinitely.
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.
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.
In India, we have different energy consumption bands like 0-200kWh, 200-400kWh and so on. People whose consumption is in 0-200kWh pay less as compared to 200-400kWh and so on.
Anyone thinking of doing this, don't. There's a reason we don't directly look at solar eclipse. Here's a excerpt from [1]
> Usually we close our eyes in reflex due to intense light from the Sun, but on day of an eclipse, the intensity of sunlight is decreased and we can view the Sun through naked eyes. While we watch a solar eclipse without any protection to our eyes, the ultraviolet rays penetrate our eyes and cause retinal burn, leading to loss of central vision.
In a Solar Eclipse you're getting a tiny fraction of the sun's energy and it is still enough to very quickly cause long-term physical damage to your eyes. Looking at the sun during not an eclipse is even worse.
So suddenly during an eclipse, your eyes have no idea what's painful/harmful anymore? Trust your experience, it's the closest you're ever going to get to truth.
Also you removed/downvoted my request that asked posters to identify regions they are hiring from, specifically one about Stockholm. I’m curious what motivates such actions.
Oh sorry, I totally missed that! Your use of quotation marks was just fine. I thought you were being snarky (as people sometimes do) and apologize for making the wrong assumption.
> Also you removed/downvoted my request that asked posters to identify regions they are hiring from
Well it applied to the Stockholm post mentioned. Some posts do mention it, others don't. I replied to a don't.
Wouldn't mind my post being moved to the "top" level, but in reality it means buried at the bottom. Especially since my account is a second-class citizen for some reason. Probably I had a bad day several years ago. :-/
>please don't use quotation marks to make it look like you're quoting someone when you aren't
I searched thru algolia and that quote came at first from user queSide 1 month ago, not by mixmastamyk. Unless they're the same person or the search is flawed
How are companies allowed to post the same posting for the same roles month after month? If they are not able to find great candidate fits in this environment, and their employee counts are not moving on LinkedIn / crunchbase etc for months, can they get blacklisted from using this? I have seen several of these companies post again today
Let the market decide, I.e.: people comment and call out companies that do that. If the company cares, they can defend themselves, the same way we’re trying to defend the HN community.
I’ve pointed this out before [1], we need a way to call out bad actors, and not allowing for such comments is only protecting bad actors.
Such a 'market' would need to be regulated (or managed, or supported, pick whatever word you like) - it won't work as a free-for-all, and we don't have the resources to act as arbiter. That's the point I've been making in all those explanations I listed.
Basically it would need to be a product in its own right. That may well be valuable, there's probably a need for it, — in that sense I agree with you and the other commenters making similar points. But it's not something HN can be.
> not allowing for such comments is only protecting bad actors
It also protects good actors. There are bad and good actors on both the supply and demand side of these transactions. It's easy to forget that if one is personally identified only with one side or the other, but the hiring market is fraught these days.
What about blacklisting companies that post the same links from their ATS platforms for months at a time? It may be difficult to track from an admin perspective but as an applicant that has been browsing this for a few months, a lot of these are easy to filter out
I can show examples from this current / latest monthly postings
I don't know what a ATS platform is, but there are some companies which are nearly always hiring, so the appearance of a job post each month isn't dispositive.
It will be exploited. Key word above - not tech savvy.
The only reason we have convenient banking, gov and streaming apps today is because of guaranteed and enforced mobile security by big boys Apple and Google. (Google being Ad company is another matter, not relevant here).
No, we have convenient online services in spite of the endless security theater that permeates consumer tech. All it's done is gradually increase maintenance burden and technical complexity until useful features are slowly stripped out to create a more "streamlined" experience. The mobile app for my credit union has become so shitty that I'm not even sure if losing access to it is a deal-breaker for rooting my phone - I already prefer to do my online banking and shopping on my laptop.
There is no "just works" technical solution for a problem caused mainly by naivete and gullibility. Governments and the private sector know this, of course; as others have said, the real purpose is to control users, not to protect them.
Why is the banking server trusting the client? Thats criminally incompetent security. If your website gets hacked because a client had "root" whose fault is it?
I see the cause of confusion. I was assuming and talking about the case of the legitimate user have a root/non locked down device as being imputed as the "attacker". I don't think he was talking about other people stealing or having acces to your device. And in any case, all bets are off then if you meant that scenario. At least with a browser user can choose not to save passwords and the attacker won't get bank creds, so even in that case a web app would be better.
If we have to always appeal to the lowest of the low, the stupidest of the stupidest, then society sucks ass.
What's even the point of me being alive is I can't do anything that isn't completely idiot-proof and made for goo goo ga ga users?
Look, I get it. Think of the children! Think of the granny!
But I'm not a child, I'm an adult. I would like to be treated as such. Otherwise what the fuck are we even doing here? Why can't I just live in daycare forever? Why am I paying bills?
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