Visual indicator for what push type you're getting [Rejected]

While not particularly compelled by the need for visual feedback of encoder pressure highlighted in this thread, I find your solution clever and definitely useful @riban.

Maybe (for me) an encouragement to make a more liberal use of long presses, which I seldom resort to.

Regards :slight_smile:

At least it is possible to customise the times for bold and long press. If one can not lift the finger before the long time threshold, or before crossing the bold press threshold, one might consider changing that in Webconf.

For a musician, timing is an essential ability, so it shall be easy to handle this.

Any kind of optical feedback is a further distraction and a source for software failures due to the programming efforts involved.
The next one will call for numerical a countdown and so on.
The cost of this feature outweighs the benefit by far, even not taking into account the disturbance caused.

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Although I implemented the display of button press quite nicely and simply, I am struggling to do the same for touch which works differently and even the implementation I have done is flawedā€¦ so I am moving towards @fusslā€™s recognision that this is likely to be more hassle than it is worth.

Bold and long press are a fundemental user UI method that users must learn to be able to effectively use zynthian, just like using a mouse and then later, double clicking was something we had to learn to use a computer GUI OS and touch and swipe gestures was something we had to learn to use a smart phone. None of these are intutive. They are learned behaviours. Zynthian stands on the shoulders of giants but is not afraid to inovate or do its own thing and this is an area that the original design has survived the test of time. Very few new users stuggle with this concept for long. Indeed I still remember the challenge of learning to use a mouse in the 1980ā€™s but have long forgotten the challenge of learning bold/long press of zynthian from just a few years ago.

As mentioned in this forum topic, the settings are user configurable and seldom do users (of longer than a few days) trigger the wrong action due to bad timing. (It occurs due to pressing the wrong thing - but we canā€™t anticipate such clumsiness!) I tend to find the default long press timing a little too long but not so much as to tempt me to edit it!

So, we do have an implementation that could be used to display indication of bold button presses but without similar for touch and with very little support for such a feature from the community (indeed the opposite seems to be the case), I think we are likely to reject this request.

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Is there a consideration for purely audio feedback in this regard?

I have posted a response in the ticket, including responding to the request for audio feedback. I am sorry but after extensive consideration and discussion, we have rejected this request.

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Ok.

Exit to Bar.

As already stated, I tend to be neutral about the subject of perceptual feedback of the state of encoders pressure. I am perfectly fine with the whole short-medium-long presses UX philosophy, and Iā€™ve been using it for years without any problems.

It certainly requires a specific adaptation of the muscular memory, like any set of technical gestures, but as mentioned earlier it is completely customisable in its timing.

So, no perplexities or expectations of sort on my part: I just found the @ribanā€™s visual proposal non-obtrusive and clever, if it were to be adopted and merged into Stable.

As for the topic of musical timing, it is very much cultural context-related. Non-mensural neumatic notation of the Middle Ages, for example, had a very different sense of musical timing then, say, the ensuing Renaissance mensural writing.

Just to say :slight_smile:

Just one more absolute worst design decision to add to the enormous pile.

You donā€™t have to use it Ben and you can contribute to the open source project. Otherwise, cherio!

Iā€™m probably not going to be using it much.

I predict that if I turn the Zynthian on at band practice with the intention to just play the one soundfont it was set on last time, despite having tested it in advance before the band arrives, Iā€™ll end up cursing at it when it doesnā€™t play the one soundfont and requires half an hour to diagnose why the hell it isnā€™t playing the soundfont that was working fine last time, wasting the entire bandā€™s time, then posting on the forums again asking what happened and getting a response back the next day saying the necessary feature is now hidden in some other stupid menu or is called something else or requires some other esoteric ritual to be controlled by a standard USB MIDI controller. Or itā€™ll be some other completely ridiculous complexity like about the difference between a snapshot and a subsnapshot when those two things are really the exact same thing except not except sometimes. Always sometimes.

I unfortunately donā€™t have the time in my life to dedicate to making my own alternative UI right now but I wish I did. I could at least make one that doesnā€™t have text thatā€™s literally sideways.

But apparently, even if a feature which would fix some of the more glaring and obvious terrible design choices going on at every level in this project was made, it would get rejected. So rather than contributing directly, Iā€™d be considering a hard fork if I had the time because I couldnā€™t disagree more strongly with the entire design philosophy or lack thereof in the Zynthian UI. Iā€™d want to start completely over with an entirely different paradigm.

I appreciate that the people working on it are unpaid volunteers, so they definitely deserve respect for their efforts bringing so many different software components together to make this happen at all, but I still just canā€™t stand actually using the damn thing.

The workaround for me personally is probably going to be just running a proprietary DAW in Windows on a laptop.

Others disagree.

Then donā€™t.

You have managed probably one of the greatest opening lines for a thread, Iā€™ve read in some considerable time. Itā€™s of almost operatic proportions, Wagnerian, indeed!!.

The anger is palpable and heartfelt, obviously, but we flatter ourselves to be musicians and practice is the very core of that much derided art.

I could twitter on about subjects like this all day, because I believe it gives me insight into viewā€™s of others as well as myself.

But that works best when a peer to peer relationship exists, as I would try to enter musical encounters with. By enlarge it works well.

All I can really suggest is practice.

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ā€¦and thank goodness he doesnā€™t have time. :rofl:

Sorry, Iā€™m late to the party.

Iā€™ve always thought that the short and long presses were good.
Perhaps mapping the bold press to be a ā€œdouble clickā€ would help?

For visual feedback, perhaps a flash of the status bar, or an icon in the status bar?

Iā€™ve done single button, UI development with short/bold/long before but as suggested we had audio feedback when the press passed each threshold.
for example: Beep, Beep-Beep, Beep-Beep-Beep. So for the status bar: flash, flash-flash, flash-flash-flashā€¦

@BenMcLean , You can see from my profile pic that Iā€™ve been using Zynth with a band for a number of years now. I never found a synth that did everything I wanted. Zynthian is the closest Iā€™ve ever had, and it is a work in progress unlike any of the ā€œproductsā€ I purchased and found the flaws in the first week of use.

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