Touchscreen Agony

semtek01

I’ll keep this brief, we’ve all been there.

You’re tuning your second oscillator to -700 cents in Gadget or Zen or etc

You get a rough -678 and flick around a bit, landing on let’s say -715. Now it begins. You slow your finger movement, the digits start to coalesce towards -700 and then bang suddenly +1456 flashes up. No reason why but the screen has decided to ignore your fumblings and throw you back to square one.

You try all the tricks. Hold and drag around the screen looking for an angle where a fine adjust will manifest. Again the same - it works for a few ticks but suddenly out of nowhere it throws you into a completely meaningless setting.

There’s no double click to zero incidentally on this one, so you can’t even return to a sensible point. You’re stuck desperately trying to find a decent digit between 0 and -1200.

And then there’s the issue of slow parabola. Same on all apps it seems - if you try drawing or performing a slow fade from -inf yo eg -6 the geometry of the screen will defeat you. You can try the aforesaid wide drag but if you’re trying to fade in over 16 bars it’s impossible without drawing in the automation.

I’ve tried the various accesibiiity settings. Triple finger tap to zoom helps definitely but it’s a faff as well. Finding the correct level of zoom where you can see the things you need to whilst landing on the correct key doesn’t work for all apps.

All the “treat last point as touch” stuff is useless and completely counterproductive.

Oh and the constant missed notes and so on. You want to delete one jot. Instead you end up with four surrounding it.

Small screen user. I’m sure this is part of the issue. I’m on the standard iPhone 13. And yes my fingers are not quite those of a princess.

But there must be a better way. Please help. Please.

Please.

Lol

el_bo

@semtek01 said:
But there must be a better way. Please help. Please.

There is a better way, though it won't be on the synth you're using, nor on the majority of others. Kinda boggles my mind, really, as this issue had a solution a long time back...but I don't recall ever seeing it implemented elsewhere on iOS

Short of this, perhaps you might have better luck using a stylus?

semtek01

@el_bo said:
There is a better way, though it won't be on the synth you're using, nor on the majority of others.

Short of this, perhaps you might have better luck using a stylus?

Yeah that is a nice solution. I can see why the devs don’t do it - anything that crowds the screen even further is a huge Nono right now. That behaviour does exist on some synths but you need the feedback as above - that is a killer solution really.

On iPhone will a stylus work? I imagine that the third party ones out there won’t do it very well. The Apple one is iPad only. Still can’t get with iPad as the holding of it is a drag.

Grandbear

@el_bo said:

@semtek01 said:
But there must be a better way. Please help. Please.

There is a better way, though it won't be on the synth you're using, nor on the majority of others. Kinda boggles my mind, really, as this issue had a solution a long time back...but I don't recall ever seeing it implemented elsewhere on iOS

Loopy Pro implements a similar solution. I too would like to see it adopted more widely.

el_bo

@semtek01 said:

@el_bo said:
There is a better way, though it won't be on the synth you're using, nor on the majority of others.

Short of this, perhaps you might have better luck using a stylus?

Yeah that is a nice solution. I can see why the devs don’t do it - anything that crowds the screen even further is a huge Nono right now. That behaviour does exist on some synths but you need the feedback as above - that is a killer solution really.

On iPhone will a stylus work? I imagine that the third party ones out there won’t do it very well. The Apple one is iPad only. Still can’t get with iPad as the holding of it is a drag.

Yeah, I find the iPad to be a real ergonomic nightmare and a lot of my resistance to using it stems from that. Having said that, I find the iPhone to be many times worse. Definitely spend much more time doing music on the desktop, for this reason.

As for your point about blocking the screen, in the case of the above solution, I'm not so sure anyone would really see it as enough of a hinderance to negate the benefits. The finger is on-screen anyhow, and the lines used are pretty thin (Could easily be made to be less visible, also).

el_bo

@Grandbear said:
Loopy Pro implements a similar solution. I too would like to see it adopted more widely.

Very cool that Michael has implemented it. And yes, it would be great if it became a standard on both touchscreen and desktop.

semtek01

This makes me want to try Loopy Pro immediately.

Gadget has Rotary Mode which is hidden in the iPhone settings menu. It’s not bad. It’s a bit more tangible, there are still odd jumps but you can more or less predict what it’s going to do.

[Deleted User]

The only app I can use on iPhone is Koala , nothing to do with apps In themselves but with me I was born when even Internet and mobile phone was not existing when I was young and after far too expensive to use for fun.

What do you do with your iPhone ask me people ? I call people 😂

semtek01

@BerlinFx said:
The only app I can use on iPhone is Koala , nothing to do with apps In themselves but with me I was born when even Internet and mobile phone was not existing when I was young and after far too expensive to use for fun.

What do you do with your iPhone ask me people ? I call people 😂

Looooooooooool

Nobody calls anybody anymore lol. Close family and gf / bf at times of urgent need. Otherwise it’s text or straight to the voicemail.

Grandbear

@semtek01 said:

@BerlinFx said:
The only app I can use on iPhone is Koala , nothing to do with apps In themselves but with me I was born when even Internet and mobile phone was not existing when I was young and after far too expensive to use for fun.

What do you do with your iPhone ask me people ? I call people 😂

Looooooooooool

Nobody calls anybody anymore lol. Close family and gf / bf at times of urgent need. Otherwise it’s text or straight to the voicemail.

Lol, same, a voice call is code for "this is urgent, drop everything" among us

semtek01

PPS - before anybody pipes up with “mobile music making isn’t for pro applications.”

Are you kidding? Top down people are now on mobile platforms for their music making. Everything up to and sometimes including the mix.

Maybe you run it through a hardware summing apparatus if you’re really fancy but most of the time it sounds worse not better,

semtek01

@Grandbear said:

Lol, same, a voice call is code for "this is urgent, drop everything" among us

So true. And guitarists. They get a pass.

el_bo

@BerlinFx said:
The only app I can use on iPhone is Koala , nothing to do with apps In themselves but with me I was born when even Internet and mobile phone was not existing when I was young and after far too expensive to use for fun.

I believe that many of the regulars around here are also old *****

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