>From time to time this comes up, as it did earlier today in this thread http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=19369
cshaida Wrote: > the late, lamented 'knob'... but that's a whole 'nother story I'd like to renew my request for this kind of interaction. To recap, the late, lamented Audiotron was also an ethernet based music player. It had a number of (in hindsight) poor design tradeoffs, including a built-in server that was too slow and was not upgradeable (let this be a lesson for people who think the SB should have the server built in). However, it did have one thing that I sorely miss on the SB, and so does practically everyone who ever had an audiotron ... The Knob. The knob was basically, well, a knob, but it was tied into a pulse encoder, so when you twiddled it, it sent a stream of pulses saying "turning right" or "turning left" to the software. Based on what mode the Audiotron was in, that meant variously "change the volume" or "scroll through a song list" or "scroll through options" or one of several other things. It basically worked like the up and down arrows on the SB remote, except that you could send a whole bunch of them at once, the display moved, and you got immediate feedback. A lot like a wheel mouse, if you've used on --- you can use it to scroll, zoom or pan, depending on how the software choses to interpret the pulses. It seems like such a simple thing, it was a simple thing, and yet it made short shrift of exactly all the things that iritate me about interacting with the SB through the remote. Now you can't put a knob on a remote without turning it into a 2 hand remote, but I have seen remotes with knurled knobs that do essentially the same thing. I had a VCR with one years ago (the VCR died, so I threw out the remote, so I can't include a picture, but the remote was fine and had no "knurled-knob-life" issues). This came up some time ago, and at the time someone (I think Michael Herger) had pictures of a USB knob he'd built for testing purposes. The interaction ease this brings needs to be experienced to be believed. So I renew my plea for an improved remote that has this function, along with the software support to react quickly enough that the interaction works properly. I guess this will need Slimserver 7, according to the roadmap, so the server will respond to the pulses fast enough. -- Michaelwagner ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Michaelwagner's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=428 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=21736 _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.slimdevices.com http://lists.slimdevices.com/lists/listinfo/discuss
