Your video sparked some great discussion at the weekly meeting between me and @Taylor - what do you think of this proposal?
We should implement a help mode for Module UIs that displays tooltip information about what knobs, buttons, and displays do.
The Help Mode would be invoked by an icon at the bottom of the screen, similar to Timing Mode.
In Help Mode, you can tap on any module UI element and a text box will pop up explaining what that element does or displays.
The text box would be editable by users so they could create their own tooltips. By default, though, the text box would open without being editable to prevent accidental changes to information.
In Help Mode, none of the knobs or buttons could be interacted with. This would make it easy to see what a knob’s function is without accidentally disconnecting a wired connection.
Some of the other things you suggested could also be implemented by adding a preset mode. What do you think of this proposal?
Audulus should have a preset function. One way to implement it would be to add a “bookmark” function that takes a snapshot of the patch as it currently is and stores it as a kind of sub-file.
When a user bookmarks the patch state, it would prompt the user to name the bookmark/preset.
These bookmarks could be navigated with a < > arrow icon set at the bottom of the screen.
This would also make tutorials really nice and compact where you could move from one element of a tutorial to another without having to have a large sprawling patch with duplicate elements.
It would be ideal to have a preset system that works on both the patch and module level.
A patch level preset could be used to navigate steps in a tutorial, or to change routing of modules. In this way, you could have an entire performance loaded up in one patch that can easily switch between different synths and sets of modules without having to exit the patch, find the next patch you want for your performance, and load that. You could simply snapshot each state and navigate between them like a setlist.
A module level preset would be used to navigate through stored knob/button settings. This would be essential to keeping presets stored when a module is created. If the presets are at the patch level only, then you could not create a module in a new patch and still navigate through its individual presets.