[PD-dev] properties hook

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Fri, 4 Aug 2006, hans at eds.org wrote:

> I am sitting here with a performance venue with pounding bass after 
> running my Swirler installation, and I just had a thought: what if there 
> was a generic "properties" hook just like the "help" hook?

for each class [foo], right-click Help opens [foo-help], so using that 
precedent, i'd say, right-click Help would open [foo-prop]. Because helps
uses its own path (-helppath), props could use their own path (-proppath) 
but I also wouldn't mind if they used the main path (-path).

a props patch could be connected to an object in any of several 
ways:

  * through patchcords, but although the messagesystem wouldn't mind, the
    canvas/editor would go crazy.

  * through send-symbols/receive-symbols, but not all objects naturally
    have a slot for those things: this scheme would require each object to
    support both a send and a receive. The send and receive of IEMGUIs
    wouldn't work for this purpose because they don't necessarily
    distinguish the one object that you want to control!

  * through pointer atoms, but Pd's pointer system is very limited. It
    only allows to point to either a canvas/scalar pair or an
    array/word pair, neither of which are appropriate. Making a t_gpointer
    point to a [comport] object, for example, is worse than making a
    pointer atom hold a gem_state* or GridOutlet*.

until now, the properties ("attributes") patches that I have made are 
connected like this:

  ,--.     ,--.
  | [foo] |  [foo-prop]
  |    `--'   |
  `----------'

that is,

#N canvas 0 0 450 300 10;
#X obj 50 0 foo-prop;
#X obj  0 0 foo;
#X connect 0 0 1 0;
#X connect 1 1 0 0;

for example, http://gridflow.ca/gallery/lti.KMeansSegmentation-help.pd.gif

(or else they are nested, e.g. [#camera] wraps [#in videodev])

However, right-click Properties need something that is more dynamic than 
that. How that should be?

  _ _ __ ___ _____ ________ _____________ _____________________ ...
| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada