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Horizontal compression and expansion viewing in the tracks view window so we can see the entire tune at one time which out having to scrool from beginnng to end


YES



scrollwheel works well for this in other apps.

You can buy the 'project bundle' of Tracktion for $14.99 at Musician's Friend right now - to have a tangible example you can test drive, to see how this works. This doesn't have all of the bells and whistle add-ons that the Ultimate Bundle had for $19.99 just a month ago - but for functionality purposes, I think there's lot's of screen layout and GUI functionality that I would love to see in PG products that you could crib directly from Tracktion. Not everything - there's alot there that confuses folks, but for how the GUI works, I think it's a pretty slick program. It made me jump from PTPA years ago because of VST/VSTi and ASIO support. I ended up falling in love with the workflow.

One simple example - graphical knobs just don't work well with a mouse-based context. The FX knobs above are an artifact of mixer hardware thinking, not from thinking about what the best way is to translate mouse movement into a sensible GUI. Sliders mimic mouse slides, not knobs.

Apple have done an outstanding job re-inventing touchscreen gestures with sensible manipulation of GUI data on the iPhone and now the iPad.

Tracktion was refreshing in that the layout was optimized for computer based recording without thinking about a hardware context as the overlay. Some of that kind of thinking IS in PG products, but there's much work to be done. The bars window is a great example of something that doesn't come from a hardware context but makes perfect sense to users.

You can do the same with effects routing, volume and pan sliders, effects send/returns, etc. It doesn't have to look like a mixer.

Last edited by rockstar_not; 03/07/11 05:21 PM.
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