To All Devs: please cater to BIG SCREENS!!!

[BONES]

I find myself squinting or at least leaning forward to read my older VSTi's like the Kompakt Player. I had to reposition my monitor closer than I liked just because of this. I understand that older VSTi's and plugins are going to continue to be a problem till replaced, but there's no excuse for newer designs not to incorporate various GUI size-options to accommodate high-resolution monitors.

What do you mean by "high resolution" I'd imagine a 32" would probably only be about 2k res, so everything should look plenty big enough, I'd have thought. I get by just fine at 1920x1200 on a 17" laptop screen but if I didn't, I'd do something about it myself, i.e. get a monitor with appropriate resolution, rather than expect everyone else to do the work to accommodate my bad choice of monitor.

Scalable GUIs can only be a good thing

I dunno, they would have to cause compromises in other areas, I'd imagine, as they would rely on vectors rather than bitmaps for a lot of elements. Either that or they'd need all the UI bitmaps in multiple sizes. I prefer skinnable UIs so that I can make them any size/layout I wish.

I don't mind the way that Olga's UI works - options to show hide different parts as well as two different sizes but Synth 1's resizable UI is ugly at any size.

[Nystul]

LCDs have native resolution. If I run mine at anything other than 1680x1050 it gets harder to read.

Certainly monitor size/resolution, at both ends of the spectrum, is something for devs to consider.

I've heard it many times, but it doesn't jive with my own experience in recent years. I turned my LCD monitor from 1920x1200 to 1024x768, and I could read browser text standing about 8 feet away from the monitor. I even play some old 640x480 fullscreen games, and they look better with the scaling algorithms than they ever did on the CRT monitors they were designed for. On any monitor, the sharpest picture will come from it's ideal resolution, but it's not like the alternatives are so terrible. Compared to the old days of CRT monitors that had to calibrated absolutely perfectly and still were terrible for text...

[foosnark]

Well, I can read text in 1024x768 on my monitor, but I'd rather stab myself repeatedly with a fork.

In fact I'd have to be about 8 feet away for the blurriness to not drive me mad.

[contrary]

My viewsonic simply looks like crap at any other resolution than the native one (1680X1050).

I use Custom DPI settings , but that has it's downside , Really , it can't be that hard to at least offer two different sizes can it ?? ( Leslie Stanford's Colbalt is a good example )

I've always loved the sounds that come from styrus , for example , But the UI always is a deal breaker because good sounds don't trump the eye strain.

[MaliceX]

I don't see what everyone's complaining about. I can see small GUI's fine with the aforementioned resolution (1680x1050), on a Samsung 22" SyncMaster 226BW LCD monitor.

In addition, if the devs were to 'cater for big resolutions', chances are you'll get the Helix GUI haters. (ZOMG TOO BIG ZOMG SMALL TEXTS!!!!111 )

If all devs were to be like synth1 or KarmaFX with adjustable GUI sizes, that would be great but sadly it's not possible at all instances. (Particularly in the case of dimension increase as opposed to image scaling, which can't always be done if GUI relies on raster images.

[tomg]

I find myself squinting or at least leaning forward to read my older VSTi's like the Kompakt Player.

Virtual Magnifying Glass Portable
http://portableapps.com/apps/accessibil ... s_portable

[kritikon]

But it does beg a question. Why on earth would you get such a huge monitor, if not to have more real estate available to see more things at once?

Exactly. Having only recently gone onto a bigger screen, I'm still overjoyed at how much more of my sequencer I can see, how many more plugins I can have up without losing crucial parts of the sequencer, and how much less organised I can be because I've got more space to waste. I don't want it all clogged up by huge GUIs thanks.

If you've got to squint, buy spectacles - it helps no end.

[tomg]

I find myself squinting or at least leaning forward to read my older VSTi's like the Kompakt Player.

Virtual Magnifying Glass Portable
http://portableapps.com/apps/accessibil ... s_portable

Or use the one in Windows if you need an active cursor.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/usin ... urnon.mspx


This one is good.. You can resize the window and position it anywhere on the screen you want. Make any VST any size you want..

http://www.gipsysoft.com/zoomplus/#downloadit

[stefancrs]

I have to join the "I-don't-get-it-crowd" here. Higher screen resolution on computers is supposed to give you more screen estate (the actual DPI precision has, imo, been good enough for quite a long time now). If you want a large screen but less native pixels, maybe using a LCD TV could be an option? Or just use a smaller computer screen but sit fairly close to it.

[JavaJ]

Well, I run a 17" laptop at native resolution and all VSTi's are too small for use on a stage where my laptop will be at an arms length away from me. If I drop the resolutions down- the text is then scalled and I get odd visual anomalies with the lower res (which is normal as you are scalling outside of the physical pixel count). Wusikstation has a large GUI option which helps. MDrummer can fill the entire screen- but maintains the same text size which is hard to read. I guess we will have to wait for higher res screens to be the bare minimum before everyone codes for it.

[Breeze]

OK: I have to clarify a few things because there's more and more "I don't get it" posts.

A 30" monitor typically has 2560x1600 resolution and it's absolutely fine with my DAWS, either Logic or Nuendo. I find it priceless to have a really wide and long arrange window and I'm able to get two rows of the fully vertically expanded Nuendo Mixer along with the Control Room on one screen. Visibility in the DAW operations is perfect and the detail is fantastic. Scoring benefits from seeing more staves on the screen as well. Yes, the point is to see more and this purpose is accomplished.

I much prefer the single 30" to the dual 21"'s I had before because I don't have to move from screen to screen and I don't have to deal with the middle bevel issue. On Mac, Spaces does a great job of dealing with multiple desktop layouts and Nuendo's window system works (most of the time...).

The problem, as I mentioned in the OP, is that some VSTi's have information cramped into tiny spaces often with tiny fonts that are difficult to read on a large monitor probably because the devs developed on smaller monitors. Next time you're in an Apple store, take a look at Logic's Sculpture synth on a 30" screen and you'll understand what I mean. The tiny Kompakt file selections are also very much a hassle. I don't want to start targeting specific devs; it's a competitive market and the OP was meant as a general observation, but there are others that suffer from the same issues, sometimes also made worse by color choices.

I recently became a Zebra2 user, and when I saw how flexibly it could adapt to different monitor sizes, I thought a heads up to other devs was called for. I don't use Zebra's LARGEST resolution, but it's there if I need it. It just struck me how forward thinking an idea it was. I was lol!

BTW: thanks for the links to magnifying utilities. I'm going to check them out. The Mac allows you to just hold control and the mouse wheel zooms in and out of the screen (system wide), which, for example, helps a lot when working with Sculpture.

The point is making UIs that can adapt to a user's needs. I'm not going to scrap my 30" monitor just because a handful of GUI's cause me grief especially with the workflow enhancements I've gained. And as this thread has shown, alternate GUI sizes can be useful to smaller monitors as well, especially for mobile platforms. I hope the point is clearer.

[tony tony chopper]

The point is making UIs that can adapt to a user's needs.

they can, in 2 ways:


-2 drawings/layouts of the UI. Basically twice the work, and you're the one who will pay for that.

-a vectorial UI, but today's resolutions aren't good enough to have scaled vectorial UI's looking as good as bitmaps (& this is why the font of this text you're reading still requires proper hinting. When screen res will be 3 or 4x higher, the font you're reading will have 3 or 4 pixels-thick bars, won't really require hinting anymore, and vectorial renderings will be perfect to the eyes. But that's for the future. Vista has started predicting this & offers post-scaling of windows for future compatibility reasons)


And I'm sorry but Zebra isn't the best example of a scalable UI, it exhibits everything of what we're talking about: fonts aren't perfectly hinted, thus require higher sizes to be as readable as say, cleartype in Windows, and bitmaps are stretched without any good resampling, making them look even worse than they would ideally do (plus this can be pushed to the extreme with fractal-based rescaling). At the same time, its panels stay pixel-aligned, so that's a good thing.

If you want to see a good example, try SynthMaker. Still, SynthMaker does it as perfectly as it could (& of course it's slower but everything has a CPU cost), but it still can't match bitmap UI's on today's monitors.

[Rock]

No giant guis!

[Kyran]

And I'm sorry but Zebra isn't the best example of a scalable UI, it exhibits everything of what we're talking about: fonts aren't perfectly hinted, thus require higher sizes to be as readable as say, cleartype in Windows, and bitmaps are stretched without any good resampling, making them look even worse than they would ideally do (plus this can be pushed to the extreme with fractal-based rescaling). At the same time, its panels stay pixel-aligned, so that's a good thing.

So what have we learned: people don't mind a little bit of graphical imperfection if it drastically increases usability.

[koalaboy]

Vector UIs are perfectly doable these days (I'm writing them for work - non music, in Java) and the resolution is easily enough. They're the best solution, but require more effort generally.

There's no reason why any UI can't be user rescalable, other then time and effort (and therefore cost), and the fact that there may not be a system library to easily do the work for you.

The biggest problem is fitting everything on to a small resolution, for backwards compatibility.

Then again, good User Interface design takes far longer than anything else, and so is generally left as a lesser priority.