[PD] PD usability

CK x at meta.lo-res.org
Wed Feb 12 18:20:51 CET 2003


hi marc,

I'm not really sure I understand what you want. Do you need some rethoric
ammo to convince people to - ahem - switch[tm] (or [switch~]) ?
Or do you want to discuss / start a flamewar about the various flavours
of max ?

At least I can see some confusion between 


			of os
- ease of installation            (= technical skill)
                        of sw

- fancy look,feel                 (= taste)
- actual usability                (= socialization) 

I don't use max/msp because I find the look and feel and usability of osx
very crappy (for _me_), at least I have terminal window now but it takes
about 6 secs to show up (0.2 on my stoneage g3 running debian) and I don't
want to put several afternoons into figuring out how to turn off all these
cpu consuming special fx.

I read:
> I had a strange conversation yesterday with a teacher who basically said
> that free software sucks because of usability issues, and that he'll

rubbish, I don't know how hard it is to install redhat and download the
planet stuff but 
./configure
make && su -c "make install"
surely isn't the steepest learning curve out there
 
> refuse to teach Pure Data because Max is vastly superior at the
> cognitive level. The segmented patch cord functionnality seems to be of
> major importance to him. He also seemed quite revolted by the
> installation process of the OSX version. 

if you can't do good looking, intuitive and easy to maintain patches without
hiding/segmenting patchcords you basically didn't get the point of graphical
programming, go back sit down and rearrange, abstract and clean up.

> So to him, the whole idea of
> free software is simply irrelevent. This man (who call himself an
> anarchist, go figure) is telling all those young people that they must
> pay a fortune to get a fancy Mac and a Max/MSP/Jitter licence.

sure max/msp/jitter has some features pd lacks (but this holds also true
the other way round) but the major advantage of free software is access
to the sources (no more waiting 4 days on a mailing list just to be told
that there is a hardcoded limit of n whatevers in the source just for 
example), having access to the guts of my tools is so important to me
by now that I stop reading announcements for software that sounded quite
nice when I get to the point where they tell me it's binary only but free
for non-commercial use.

> I'm the only one in my community to use free software for multimedia
> production. I'd really like my people to use free software, but they
> simply don't want to, because the very second they are in touch with "no
> so easy to use" softwares, they almost puke. 

unix is user friendly - it's just a little bit picky about who it's friends 
are

> How could we make PD better

it's great the way it is, well a callback based jack implementation maybe ...

> so these people would agree using free software? I stopped using Max

fine, but why shouldn't other people choose to use max/msp or jmax (non-free
java - but a very clean design) or director or VB or whatever ?

> with a puffy look, but can we focus a little bit on the graphical
> interface issues? I need those Mac addicts to use PD. I like being in
> touch with people on this list, but I also need real people (those I get
> in touch with everyday) to use the same tools than me.

there ain't much I can do about that, and I guess if you show off some
of the cooler stuff that pd can do to some of your colleagues they might
understand that even for them under certain circumstances pd is a much more
appropriate tool than what they are using now.

regards,

x

-- 
chris at lo-res.org	Postmodernism is german romanticism with better
http://pilot.fm/	special effects. (Jeff Keuss / via ctheory.com)




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