Trevor PaughSystems engineer
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Trevor PaughProject Chronicles
Project Chronicles/chronicles

Chronicles / Bopsmith

Sliders, not dials

Design

After using the new editor, the owner asked for three changes: a way to clear a drum pattern, notes that can be dragged between steps, and sliders in place of the sound dials, which were hard to read. All three were built in one slice, and the first-load budget was raised once, from 45 to 48 KB, to make room.

The Sound tab on a phone: each setting is a labelled horizontal slider with its value and both ends named, instead of a rotary knob.
The Sound tab on a phone: each setting is a labelled horizontal slider with its value and both ends named, instead of a rotary knob.

The day’s look pass put the editor in front of the owner as it was meant to appear, and using it turned up three frictions.

The three asks

  • Clear pattern. Emptying a drum pattern meant tapping off every hit. There is now a Clear pattern control on phone and desktop, a per-voice clear on the phone, and a trash button on each lane on desktop. Clearing an already empty pattern does not add an undo step.
  • Press and drag. A melodic note or a drum hit can be picked up and moved to another step. A short movement threshold separates a drag from a tap, the note previews when lifted, and a whole move is one undo. On desktop a drum hit can also move between lanes; dropping outside the grid cancels.
  • Sliders. The owner found the rotary dials for settings such as filter, decay and drive unintuitive. They are now horizontal sliders, each labelled at both ends (Dark to Bright, Short to Long) with its value shown. Pressing jumps to a point and dragging fine-tunes, the arrow keys work, a double tap resets, and one drag is one undo step. The knob component was removed.

Spending the budget

The previous slice had left thirty-two bytes of headroom in the first-load budget. Rather than squeeze the new controls in, the Sound tab became its own lazily loaded chunk, and the budget was raised once, from 45 to 48 KB compressed, with the reason recorded in the size-check script. That is a deliberate one-time step, not a new habit.

Known gaps went on the list: on a phone, a vertical swipe that starts on a lit pad drags it instead of scrolling, touch was tested only with synthetic events, and the Sound tab is blank for a moment on its first open while its chunk arrives. The owner reviewed it the same day, merged it, and both slices went live on bopsmith.com on 11 October.