[PD] Pop-up window

[guenter geiger]

On Mon, 15 Oct 2001, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:

> > andychen5018 wrote:
> > 
> > Hi, everyone,
> > 
> > Is it possible for PD object to generate a pop-up window to input
> > arguments upon it's creation?  I just think that having a long list of
> > arguments when instantiating an object is cubersome and less clear.
> > People might not even know that they can have arguments for the
> > object.  With pop-up window, it will be a reminder for people to put
> > in arguments.  And it will be also more clear to show what the
> > arguments are for.
> > 
> > If anyone has some ideas of how to do that, please help me.
> > 
> > thx
> > 
> > Andy Chen
> 
> in pd, windows are handled by tcl/tk, and you would have to write
> tk-code to have pop-up windows.
> maybe you should look at the g_7_guis.* files
> 
> ..tcl/tk-code is said to be painful for hackers (but i have never tried
> myself)
> 

Well, my suggestion to be able to extend user friendliness would be to
define a high level propertiy dialog in the tcl/tk code, that would make
it possible to use just one function of tcl tk for property input,
and it would be easy to port that to other GUI toolkits.

As I see it properties and instantiation arguments are the same, 
so having one common interface for them would be a good idea.

- its easy to implement
- we would get rid of ugly tcl/tk code piping
- we would have property dialogs for every object that has some states to
be set.

The problems are:
- we have to take care that object that change their number of inlets,
outlets according to some creation argument can do that even after
instantiation

Guenter