.A few quick comments before I go to bed:
– The selection frame’s a little awkward at first, but soon feels right and looks very nice. The SMR buttons and the mixing grid being overlapped skews the picture, though.
– Separation lines on track headers are great, as are the transparant volume faders! 8)
– Tiny selectors on track headers, hmm… I haven’t found a device with a name that takes more than half of the available space. Also the lack of bypass buttons – there’s more than enough room, I think. Like this, the only way for newcomers trying Podium for the first time (meaning no knowledge of keyboard shortcuts or mixer options) using the default setup to bypass a plug-in is in the rack panel. But maybe this is just a far-fetched example.
– The whole upper half of horizontal fader grooves is drowned in shadows, making it unnecessarily hard to see the coloring, which is such a nice feature. 🙁
– I like the non-shadowy look of the vertical fader grooves, but as I said before it looks blurry on dark background. I also wouldn’t mind them being even a little wider still.
Here’s another way to display bypass buttons I believe worth mentioning (used in Fabfilter plug-ins). The control’s not (just) a selector like in Podium, but the principle can be applied to those as well. Just disregard the level bar, +/- and X buttons on the sides.
1. Control in its normal state. (If you move the mouse on it you can adjust the level)
2. Mouse hovering over left edge of control – it turns into a little power button.
3. Control in bypassed state, without the mouse hovering over it.
Podium’s bypass X button could, for example, appear as soon as the mouse cursor is moved anywhere on a selector button, like saying “Hi! If you want to bypass this thing, I’m over here. Otherwise just click anywhere else to open the editor.”
@thcilnnahoj wrote:
A few quick comments before I go to bed:
Thanks for the feedback.
– Tiny selectors on track headers, hmm… I haven’t found a device with a name that takes more than half of the available space. Also the lack of bypass buttons – there’s more than enough room, I think. Like this, the only way for newcomers trying Podium for the first time (meaning no knowledge of keyboard shortcuts or mixer options) using the default setup to bypass a plug-in is in the rack panel. But maybe this is just a far-fetched example.
Yes, that was a mistake. The bypass buttons are now shown on the track headers. I also noticed a bug that has appeared in beta9, causing the entire selector to be colored as bypassed, even when a separate bypass button is shown. That is now fixed.
– The whole upper half of horizontal fader grooves is drowned in shadows, making it unnecessarily hard to see the coloring, which is such a nice feature. 🙁
– I like the non-shadowy look of the vertical fader grooves, but as I said before it looks blurry on dark background. I also wouldn’t mind them being even a little wider still.
The shadows are drawn using the same algorithm that is used for all shadows in Podium: The lighting comes from above (slightly to the left), so the horizontal grooves will be naturally darker than the vertical ones. I’ll see if I can twist reality a bit.
Here’s another way to display bypass buttons I believe worth mentioning (used in Fabfilter plug-ins). The control’s not (just) a selector like in Podium, but the principle can be applied to those as well. Just disregard the level bar, +/- and X buttons on the sides.
1. Control in its normal state. (If you move the mouse on it you can adjust the level)
2. Mouse hovering over left edge of control – it turns into a little power button.
3. Control in bypassed state, without the mouse hovering over it.Podium’s bypass X button could, for example, appear as soon as the mouse cursor is moved anywhere on a selector button, like saying “Hi! If you want to bypass this thing, I’m over here. Otherwise just click anywhere else to open the editor.”
Unfortunately this behaviour is not very “touch screen” friendly. I’m not saying I’m going to change the entire Podium UI to focus on touch screen support, but I do think that touch screen operation will become more prominent in the future. So I keep that in mind when I design UI behaviour. Pressing on a touch screen will perform a click, and so you don’t have the usual mouse cursor you can move over controls to reveal more options.
Extra comments 😀
– Could be possible hide Bus Return and Master from track list? (not from mixer!) I think they’re unuseful and a waste of valuable vertical space.
– When tracks are minimized appears the “minimize button” and when they’re maximized appears the “maximized button”?
From here:
To here:
