[PD] Pd in white on black and OSC
Hans-Christoph Steiner
hans at eds.org
Thu Nov 20 19:14:48 CET 2003
On Wed, 19 Nov 2003, e skogen wrote:
> > My 2 cents on PD's gui: I agree that the present gui is minimalistic,
> > but that should maybe be seen as a plus. I would give priority to pd
> > evolving into a full-featured audio/graphics/video processing
> > environment, rather that striving to look cool.
>
> I think it's true that Pd has always put more emphasis on technical
> features than usability features, and has gotten very powerful very
> quickly because of this. But when dragging simple GOP abstractions
> across a fullscreen slows my 750 mhz machine to a crawl, it seems like a
> technical problem just as much as a usability one.
Having a black and white GUI with simple graphics makes Pd more
usable in my opinion. There are other issues with Pd's GUI that make it
less usable.
> To be honest, I have not looked at Pd's GUI code and I don't know if I'd
> be able to understand it really. Perhaps there is much that can be done
> to speed Tcl/tk up. But i'm under the impression that a replacement GUI
> is still the way to go.
Tcl/Tk may have fallen out of favor these days, but in this situation it
works well, except for some optimization issues. tigital is working on
porting Tcl/Tk to CoreGraphics on MacOS X, which will make a huge
difference in performance. He's already gotten some early versions
working.
I recommend trying out Kzrysztof's toxy objects and you'll see that Tcl
has some serious advantages. I don't think that it would be easy to have
this level of access to the GUI if it was written with wxWindows.
> I'm wondering how this would affect externals developers, though? Would
> new libraries be built to allow easy access to a new Pd GUI? Or would
> they be expected to learn the new toolkit (wx or not)?
Any object that has anything beyond the standard Pd box would have to be
rewritten. It would be a large undertaking on the part of numerous people
with only minor, if any, gains. I think it would be much more worthwhile
to put that same effort into optimizing Tcl like tigital is.
> I suppose it's a lot easier for me to criticize and ask for software
> changes when I have so little invested in the code!
Indeed. No one is going to stop you from writing your own wx GUI for Pd,
in fact, a lot people might help.
.hc
> > Tcl/tl is very portable
> > and feels responsive enough to me even on my old laptop (Pentium 133)
> > which is not really the best system for realtime audio. I cannot say the
> > same about wxWindows.
>
> You say you cannot say the same about wxWindows. Is that because you
> have had been results with wxWindows programs, or because you have not
> used wxWindows before?
>
>
> -- eric
>
>
>
>
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zen
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