[kitotik]

In the early days of the iOS App Store I worked on a music iPad app. Through many hours of user testing and researching prior art, the best solution we came up with was detecting the trajectory of the user input and supporting both vertical dragging and dial-like rotation. It took a shitload of trial and error fine tuning, but it eventually turned out pretty well.

I think many music apps these days give you the option buried somewhere in settings.

[scrumper]

> option somewhere buried

That’s what I did. Made it slide by default (because I hate trying to twist a virtual knob). I briefly had a translucent rectangle popup when the control was in slider mode but it turned out not to be helpful as linear dragging seemed to make sense to everyone and I only had like eight options in total.

The one nice innovation I had was automatically detecting horizontal or vertical drags - useful for things like pan controls where a horizontal motion makes more sense.