Hi! I just bought Aalto, and I really love it. Also, I'm very impressed with the beautifully written and designed manual!
// 1. Problem
I see a lot of tunings that I want to check out and compare, but the thought of re-opening the menu over and over isn't very appealing.
This is also true when I want to compare presets across different categories, or compare the first and last preset in a category.
// 2. Who's doing it right?
I quite like the way it's done in Native Instruments' Razor. You can click on an icon to make the menu stay open until you've found what you want, or you can de-activate it to have the menu close once you make a choice.
OP-X-II-Pro has two preset menus - one that closes when a preset is chosen, and another one that stays open and allows me to compare items until I click outside of it.
I quite like the look of Omnisphere 2's mini browser @ 9:30 https://vimeo.com/117503596 - the rest seems a bit overkill though.
Circle's oscillator menu stays open, and shows a lot of waveforms, which allows me to rapidly compare them, which is very enjoyable.
// 3. What could Aalto/Kaivo's implementation look like?
I imagine this could be done with one small on/off switch labeled "menus stay open" in the header.
This could all apply to the preset and tuning menus, and to the LFO2D/granulator/resonator/body menus as well, in Kaivo's case.
In "stay open" mode, the menus could be exited by either clicking outside of them, clicking a small "x" button, or by double-clicking a preset. Single-clicks load a preset, while double-click closes the menu.
In some cases, it would also be nice with a larger browser, like the Omnisphere 2 mini browser example.
I realise this might not be top priority. The current GUI is both aesthetically pleasing and easy to make sense of, so it's already doing its job very well. However, I personally really enjoy some extra attention to interaction design.
Thanks for your amazing work, Randy!
- Kristian
Welcome aboard, and thanks for the feedback and ideas. I'm always trying to find ways to do things better. I've thought that some time down the road it would be cool to be able to interpolate between presets, so maybe the "advanced preset browser" can be the same UI that allows that.