Fwd: [GEM-dev] about splash-screen

[IOhannes m zmoelnig]

james tittle wrote:
> ...don't know if ya got this during your email probs yesterday:

no i didn't get it, thanks for the forward

i split my answers in several mails...

> 
> Begin forwarded message:
> 
>> From: james tittle <tigital at mac.com>
>> Date: March 27, 2006 11:06:58 AM EST
>> To: IOhannes m zmoelnig <zmoelnig at iem.at>
>> Cc: gem-dev <gem-dev at iem.at>
>> Subject: Re: [GEM-dev] Re: [GEM-cvs] Gem/src/Base GemSIMD.cpp,  NONE,
>> 1.1 GemSIMD.h, 1.3, 1.4
>>
>> On Mar 24, 2006, at 4:32 PM, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:
>>
>>> usually only one single instance of GemSIMD will be created during  the
>>> life-cycle of Gem, serving as an initialization of the cpu-check.
>>> this instantiation is done in GemMan (right after the splash-screen).
>>
>>
>> ...splash screen?  I saw this committed, but what's the idea of  it? 
>> Is this something to come up when Gem is loaded?  Or when a  gemwin is
>> opened?

oh, by "splash-screen" i mean the lines displayed on the pd-console when
you have sucessfully loaded Gem: the one with "GEM: Graphics Environment
for Multimedia" and all the authors.

however, i have recently committed a (yet empty) Geo-object "GemSplash".
the reasoning behind this is, that it would be nice to to make an object
[Gem] which you can put somewhere in your patch in order to load the
library "Gem".
of course you can do that (loading Gem via an object [Gem]) already, but
the object creation will fail, because there is no such object within
the library.
this can be fixed in various ways, e.g. create an object with no inlets
 and outlets (just like the iemlib does it).
then i thought it would be good to use the existing framework to include
this object; however, you cannot just create an object "Geos/Gem.cpp"
because you will get naming conflicts with the auto-registering macro magic.
so i thought there i would just make another object which has an alias
"Gem".

furthermore i thought, it would be nice if this object could do something.
the first idea that came to my mind was a Geo that would display some
info on Gem (in the gem-window), kind of a "splash-screen" with more or
less the same information as is given on the console when loading.

i don't like the idea of a "real" splash-screen (something that pops up
and that you cannot disable), but if the user is given the choice to
include it (who would want that, i wonder) it would be nice.

so i created a (still empty) Geo-object "GemSplash" (to avoid the name
problem) and aliased it to "Gem".
now you could just connect a [gemhead] to the [Gem] and it should (in
future times) display something cool.

however, i haven't found the time to actually put something in there,
esp. as this object should - must - not rely on anything installed on
the computer apart from pd/Gem, which makes text display a bit wearisome.

a continuative (what a word...) idea was, that we could do community
based competitions for this splash screen, which would change for each
release (considering a release cycle of 2 years we should be able to
find at least _one_ person who would create such object for each release
;-))

of course this is a bit weird, as this object would have to be coded
directly in C++ which somehow contradicts the paradigm of using objects...


what do you think?


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