
Palette Gear: Hands-On Control of Your Favourite Software - prawn
http://palettegear.com/index
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scrumper
I like it. Something I see in music tech in particular is a growing number of
hardware controllers interacting with specialized software; the marriage is
really powerful and makes for a very pleasant and productive experience.
Native Instruments Maschine (sic) is a great example.

More 3D printing will only increase that, and I think we'll start to see ever
more task-specific hardware devices augmenting (and replacing in some cases)
traditional keyboards and mice.

The tangible nature of a real physical controller just can't be approached by
multitouch devices.

EDIT: thought some more about this. I'd be worried about weight and slipping:
what anchors it to the desk? It'll be frustrating and fatiguing to use if you
have to keep pulling it back in place every time you grab a knob.

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FreedomToCreate
The price is high but I had a chance to play around with a set and the quality
is impeccable. The dials and buttons have a great tactile feel and everything
works fast. Blows away having to go through adobe control panel. I really want
one, especially once film editing is better integrated, but for now the cost
slightly above my needs. Would recommend to any professionals.

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lcrs
I'm interested to know how they're interfacing with the Adobe apps. I hooked
up trackballs to Levels in Photoshop using the official "Connection SDK" a
couple of years ago and the latency felt terrible, as far as I could tell due
to Photoshop's response time. Hopefully something has improved there in the
interim...
[http://lewisinthelandofmachines.tumblr.com/post/60137039416/...](http://lewisinthelandofmachines.tumblr.com/post/60137039416/poverty-
stricken-grading-part-2-mans-dont-even)

Seems a shame there isn't a standard for mapping hardware to generic UI
controls, the way MIDI is ubiquitous in audio production. All video apps
support control surfaces of some kind but
Avid/Tangent/Filmlight/Davinci/Lightworks panels all use their own closed
protocols and I'm not aware of any of them having been reverse-engineered :(

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jestar_jokin
With a bit of work, you can get similar functionality using off-the-shelf MIDI
controllers and AutoHotKey. Here's my efforts:

\- Map sliders and buttons on a Novation Nocturn to media keys (volume, play,
stop, mute etc). \- Map a foot pedal (Behringer FCB1010) to a virtual
joystick, for use in Euro Truck Simulator 2.

AHK is super powerful for Windows automation, so I'm sure you create more
sophisticated mappings that tweak the "Saturation" value when a certain window
or dialog is open.

I think given the range of MIDI controllers available, this would give you
more options for physical inputs. Can you imagine using a "Yamaha WX5 MIDI
Wind Controller" to control Photoshop?

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red_admiral
The idea is great. The cheapest option available is $199 for a slider, two
buttons and a dial ... I'm wondering how much it would cost to build something
similar out of an arduino and a few electrical components, then connect it up
as a USB HID or something. 3D-printed casing too of course. Less than $100?

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daveguy
It's the slick design and component based magnetic click-together
configuration that you're paying for. Like icefox points out. That kind of
design and polish would take a lot more than $199 worth of your time. Although
it would be pretty fun as a hobby DIY project (even cooler with sensor blocks
for testing robotics/iot/etc).

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fumar
I like this solution, but does "feel" costly with a starting price of $199. I
would love to see a MIDI (hardware) expert create a similar offering that
could be used with music software and the adobe suite.

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brandonmenc
Kind of expensive when you can get something like a Behringer BCR2000 with 24
rotary encoders for $150.

The real killer product would be software that intelligently maps MIDI to
Photoshop. Does that exist?

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zokier
Fun thing, apparently GIMP (on Linux at least) supports MIDI as input device:
[https://www.gimp.org/unix/howtos/gimp-
midi.html](https://www.gimp.org/unix/howtos/gimp-midi.html)

Of course I don't expect that to be very polished feature, but I'm kinda
tempted to buy some cheap controller just to try it out.

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vvanders
Nifty, I feel like it's really missing a simple 8-segment label so you can
easily remember what you've mapped various actions to.

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eximius
I kind of want to make this work in Star Citizen...

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prawn
I'd be interested in trying this with Photoshop.

Wonder if they would've been better off if each module was a group of 3-4
blocks?

