[Suggestion] New meters: "Knob" and "Slider"

[MaroonED]

Most meters are mainly used for displaying things - images, text, you name it. Some are for user interaction - Button meters are a good example. For skins requiring more sophisticated mouse interactions, a sometimes complicated combination of different meters must be used to emulate rotary knobs or progress bars. Some recent examples of user attempts:

Rotary knob: http://rainmeter.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=61890#p61890
Slider: http://rainmeter.net/forum/viewtopic.php?p=75503#p75503

To make these tasks easier, we might want to consider two new meters: "Knob" for rotary button input, and "Slider" for linear bar-type input. I'm imagining the same mouse behaviour as most DAW or DJ software tools:

Slider: The user holds the slider handle/button with the left mouse button, slides it to the desired position and releases the mouse button there. A right-button click usually resets the slider to a pre-set position.
Knob: The user holds down the left mouse button and slides it upwards for clockwise rotation and downwards for a counterclockwise rotation, and releases the mouse button when the desired rotation is shown. A right-button click usually resets the knob to a pre-set position.

For implementation details, I think we could borrow some from the folks over at mixxx.org. In the skinning environment for mixxx, the "Knobs" are modeled as separate png images, each one showing one rotation angle. A configuration setting is used to determine how many increments the "Knob" will have (usually between 40 and 100). For Rainmeter, I would rather suggest using a similar format as Bitmap meters (a strip of images). "Sliders" consist of a background image, showing the "groove" and tick marks, and a separate image representing the slider knob. "Sliders" can be horizontal or vertical.

A few small examples:

knob_slider1.png

knob_slider2.png

knob_slider3.png

"Slider" meters could potentially be used to create scrollbars as well.

One concern is that, as far as I know, Rainmeter doesn't handle mouse dragging (today).

I hope I could trigger some ideas with this post... if anyone wants more details, I can describe in more detail how this could work (from a user's standpoint), as well as provide more details from the mixxx example.

MaroonED

[Alex Becherer]

as much as i like this i rather see this as a plugin, as the use for it is pretty limited. the only things that come in mind are:
- volume
- position of a song
- configuring variables

[jsmorley]

Rainmeter doesn't do mouse dragging today, nor does the Update cycle work in a way that can support "smooth" dragging of an object if it did.

This is something we might be able to attack in the future, with some ideas we are currently exploring, but likely not in the near term.