After 25 years of pots taking a radial cursor input, the lion kingdom finally called it quits & converted to the standard linear cursor input. The linear cursor resolution is 1/2 percent per pixel. It's no longer a replica of a motion you would make in real life, but the mane advantage is being able to nudge a value after clicking, while the radial cursor motion would throw off the value after clicking. The small radius of the 1st click threw it off until you moved the cursor to a longer radius to regain more precision.


The idea of the pot shape is now just to convey something that moves. Pots take the least amount of space to convey their function, even though their graphical indication of position is useless. More could be done to convey the relative position of the pot, although audio programs have similarly avoided drawing any tick marks in exchange for saving space. Audio programs sacrifice a huge amount of space to draw tick marks.
Pots are abundant in the audio side. The video side uses sliders abundantly. The vertical slider has never been used, because monitors are wider than tall. Screen space has always been more efficiently used by horizontal widgets.


Audio programs championed the distracting, space consuming user interface. They're quite opposite from the quest of video programs to be less distracting. Butch Vig's vocals plugin is the ultimate attempt to get your attention with loads of graphics. In exchange for that, he manages to charge $29.