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[Closed] spinner/slider combo UI: handy or too much?

I’ve been working on a rollout for distribution, and I’m looking for opinions on one of the UI elements. Now, when I’m caught up in making something I get annoyed with having to fuss with a spinner, but I get equally annoyed with the imprecision of a slider. So in this rollout I made each of the parameters adjustable by both a spinner and a slider. I initially thought it was kind of cool, but a colleague remarked that it hit him as a bit visually inelegant and redundant (that’s actually a pretty good description of me). Now I’m not so sure how cool it in fact is.

Here’s a little dummy rollout I wrote as a demo


rollout spinslide_combo "Spinner/Slider Combo" width:200 height:210
(
button btn_makeSphere "Make Sphere" pos:[32,8] width:136 height:24
groupBox grp1 "Radius" pos:[16,40] width:168 height:76
slider sld_radius "" pos:[24,76] width:152 height:25 range:[10,100,50]
spinner spn_radius "" pos:[80,56] width:88 height:16 range:[10,100,50]
groupBox grp2 "X-Position" pos:[16,124] width:168 height:76
spinner spn_xpos "" pos:[80,140] width:88 height:16 range:[-200,200,0]
slider sld_xpos "" pos:[24,160] width:152 height:25 range:[-200,200,0]
 
local c
 
on btn_makeSphere pressed do
(
c = sphere radius:50 
)
 
on sld_radius changed value do
(
c.radius = sld_radius.value
spn_radius.value = sld_radius.value
)
 
on spn_radius changed value do
(
c.radius = spn_radius.value
sld_radius.value = spn_radius.value
)
 
on sld_xpos changed value do
(
c.pos.x = sld_xpos.value
spn_xpos.value = sld_xpos.value
)
 
on spn_xpos changed value do
(
c.pos.x = spn_xpos.value
sld_xpos.value = spn_xpos.value
)
)
createDialog spinslide_combo 200 210

So, what think?
keep the sliders or get rid of them? Many thanks for you input.

2 Replies

How about using a subrollout to toggle back and forth between spinners and sliders instead? That way, when you want precision you can set it to show spinners, and when you want something more visually interactive, switch to show sliders.

1 Reply
(@bhnh)
Joined: 11 months ago

Posts: 0

Now that’s a thought!