Captain's Log: Stardate 77582.9

Today I finally got the multi-value sliders working how I want. All the interactions with them feel good, including dragging the ends of the interval around, moving the whole interval, squishing it down, etc. And the graphics are acceptable for the moment, until I work with a designer to really think about how I want things to look.

I haven't had a chance to play with them a ton, but from what I have done so far, they are incredibly useful. It really is awesome to grab a big group of objects and modify them in a way that preserves the parameter proportions -- you can experiment really quickly with a complex instrument without resetting all your carefully-tuned values to the same uniform value. It drastically reduces the tedium of tuning a complex instrument with non-uniform parameters, which was so cumbersome before that I just wouldn't do it.

There's just one more detail, which is revisiting the float32-to-GUI-text algorithm. I have something that works acceptably for single values, but now that there's a range to display like [0.5, 135.2] the current system is not quite what I want. I'm realizing that really what I need to do is to reduce the precision that's made visible, since it's mostly just distracting and cluttery. I'm thinking about how to make the fully-precise value available, and might do it by having the text label show a nice low-precision value until you click on it to edit it, in which case it will change to the full-precision value. This is important anyway in case you want to copy the parameter value to something else.

After that, I am excited to be DONE with sliders. All these things were looming TODOs in my big list, and I was kind of dreading them (for good reason, this all turned out to be way trickier than I thought). So it will be nice to be completely finished, except the visuals.