Audio software made a bit of mess with the whole knob vs. slider thing. Digidesign released several products that used their linear fader code, but they only changed the graphics -- not the mouse code! Yup, you'd move up or down and the thing would randomly turn clockwise or counterclockwise.
Somehow this became a standard.
20 years of customer confusion and complaints yields this advice: there are at least three common modes for interacting. 1) up/down | left/right, 2) radial (follow the mouse pointer) and 3) relative radial (follow the pointer, but use it as an an offset in degrees of the original position).
The latter is useful for something like a volume control (or any real-world control, really). Otherwise one wrong click and you're at max.
In each mode you want both a linear and logarithmic scaling option. Otherwise you have the "soundblaster volume" problem where all the range is between 0 and 30, and 31 to 100 is largely ornamental.
There's a bonus mode using the number in the middle as a target. If you click and drag on that, you get the up/down mode even if the outside zone is normally radial. This guarantees that nobody is happy and seems to be the alternate standard in much audio software.
Click to activate THEN mousewheel to increment/decrement (again, using the linear or log scaling) is a sane compromise.
Somehow this became a standard.
20 years of customer confusion and complaints yields this advice: there are at least three common modes for interacting. 1) up/down | left/right, 2) radial (follow the mouse pointer) and 3) relative radial (follow the pointer, but use it as an an offset in degrees of the original position).
The latter is useful for something like a volume control (or any real-world control, really). Otherwise one wrong click and you're at max.
In each mode you want both a linear and logarithmic scaling option. Otherwise you have the "soundblaster volume" problem where all the range is between 0 and 30, and 31 to 100 is largely ornamental.
There's a bonus mode using the number in the middle as a target. If you click and drag on that, you get the up/down mode even if the outside zone is normally radial. This guarantees that nobody is happy and seems to be the alternate standard in much audio software.
Click to activate THEN mousewheel to increment/decrement (again, using the linear or log scaling) is a sane compromise.