[PD] Hello!

[Karl MacMillan]

On Sun, 6 May 2001, Josh Steiner wrote:

>
> I think that probably one of the most valuable things I could contribute
> to right now is the pd-lib project, as there is a huge community of
> sharing Max patches out there.  Is anyone here a participant in that
> project?  I think that one valuable contribution to that by someone who is
> not a coder and who has access to Max/MSP is for them to spec the
> unimplemented Max externals functionality to make it easier for people
> like me (ie, with no mac) to add them to PD-Lib.  Is there something like
> this going on already?
>

Well, I started (more or less) the pd-lib project.  Unfortunately, other
things have prevented me from putting much effort into the project for a
while now.  A few people have contacted me about contributing things to
the project and I would be happy to help coordinate and give users access
to the project.  There is also a fair bit of code that has not been added
to the repository that I can try to get together in a few weeks.

> The next thing that I think needs done is an updated GUI.  Silly as it is
> to me, the fact is that lots and lots of musicians get instantly turned
> off by the "old-skool" nature of PD's gui.  It's kind of sad, but many
> people can't get beyond that to see that, though a little uglier, PD is
> easily functionally competitive, and that is the real important fact.  I
> heard a little bit about a project to make a new GTK+ gui, but it seems to
> me that it is a dead project.  I could not find the authors email address
> to ask him about it.  I persoanally think that this is a great idea, as
> the GTK toolkit is a very user friendly, slick and actively
> developed.  It's also rapidly getting to be quite cross-platform.  The
> next version 2.0 will come with automatic win32 and unix support.  That is
> in good fitting with the rest of the PD core.  Other alternative as
> wxWindows and VDK which both adopt the native widgets of the platform they
> run on, which makes it feel very natural for the user, which might give
> them an edge over raw gtk.  AbiWord uses wxWindows, which leads me to
> think that it is a good choice as AbiWord runs very well on linux as well
> as windows.
>
> http://www.guest.net/homepages/mmotta/VDKHome/vdkbuilder.html
> http://www.wxwindows.org/
>

Hmmm . . . here again you are talking about a project (the gtk pd-gui)
that I started and have not finished :| One thing to note about writing a
gui for pd is that it will probably eventually require changes to the
internals of pd.  I started the gtk gui thinking that I could simply use
the existing pd <--> pd-gui communication, but part of the reason that I
stopped is that I saw that some of the features that I wanted to implement
would require changes to this communication.  Since that time Joe Sarlo
(http://mambo.peabody.jhu.edu/~jsarlo/pd/) and Thomas Musil
(http://iem.kug.ac.at/iemlib/) have come up with some great ideas about
how to get some nice gui things happening without changes to pd, but I
still think that some changes would be nice.

Now, the overall design and implementation of PD was done almost entirely
by Miller and most projects are simply extensions using the externals api
- so this is not as much of a group project as many other open source
projects.  If you are serious about working on a new gui then maybe a
discussion about it on the list would be warranted.  To that end - Miller,
what long term thoughts do you have about the gui?

Karl

> Please give me some feedback, I'd really like to devote a lot of my time
> into advancing PD and would like to figure out how to best spend my time.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Josh
>
> PS.  If any of you are intersted in my music, I always loev feedback
> :)  MY two projects right now are:
>
> mp3.com/bluevitriol
> mp3.com/portreplicator
>
> _______________________________________________________________________
> Josh "Yoshi" Steiner - josh at xiphoidprocess.com - http://eds.org/~joschi
>
> Xiphoid Process Records - http://xiphoidprocess.com
> San Francisco based electronic music.
>
>

_____________________________________________________
| Karl W. MacMillan                                 |
| Computer Music Department                         |
| Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University |
| karlmac at peabody.jhu.edu                           |
| www.peabody.jhu.edu/~karlmac                      |
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