sign selector

While test­ing some ideas for a juke­box appli­ca­tion for my “media cen­ter” com­puter, I came to a point, where the user should be able to select an inter­pret or song from a huge list. If he knew the exact name, scrolling through a sorted list should be ok, but still a way to nar­row the list by typ­ing some ini­tial let­ters would be much faster and con­vinient. This should not be dif­fi­cult on a thouch screen, but as I also wanted  this appli­ca­tion to work on mouse-only devices, as a key­board was for exam­ple too space con­sum­ing in my con­fig­u­ra­tion. So I ended up try­ing to find an inter­face com­po­nent, allow­ing an user to enter a view let­ters with a point­ing device like a mouse or a track ball.

It is basi­cally a pop-out tech­nique, but mak­ing use of mov­ing the mouse pointer in two dimen­sions, than the com­mon lin­ear approach. Oper­ati­ing this first pro­to­type ver­sion on the left is still a lit­tle rough though.