[PD] PD usability

bbogart at ryerson.ca bbogart at ryerson.ca
Wed Feb 12 18:23:24 CET 2003


Hey Marc,

I've had the exact same experience! And ironically this was at a PC exclusive school, with only a single g3, with no MAX licence. (we happen to have many final-cut edit suites but are not allowed to install MAX on them) 

Almost every class was a discussion about what you can do in one and not the other. I mentioned a few things like SQL queries, ANN, built in robust tcp/ip and UDP communication, OpenGL (this was before jitter) mp3 streaming, etc etc... 

no convincing, but he did attend a PD workshop I did! ;)

OSX is looking nicer and nicer, but oh dear what to do about the tcl/tk thing... (Is anyone working on a cocoa GUI for PD?), wxwindows, gtk, anything else?

*sigh* 

PD is a great tool, and I agree things will only get better the more artists are using it.

Ben 

----- Original Message -----
From: Marc Lavallée <odradek at videotron.ca>
Date: Wednesday, February 12, 2003 11:32 am
Subject: [PD] PD usability

> I had a strange conversation yesterday with a teacher who 
> basically said
> that free software sucks because of usability issues, and that he'll
> refuse to teach Pure Data because Max is vastly superior at the
> cognitive level. The segmented patch cord functionnality seems to 
> be of
> major importance to him. He also seemed quite revolted by the
> installation process of the OSX version. So to him, the whole idea of
> free software is simply irrelevent. This man (who call himself an
> anarchist, go figure) is telling all those young people that they must
> pay a fortune to get a fancy Mac and a Max/MSP/Jitter licence.
> 
> I'm the only one in my community to use free software for multimedia
> production. I'd really like my people to use free software, but they
> simply don't want to, because the very second they are in touch 
> with "no
> so easy to use" softwares, they almost puke. How could we make PD 
> betterso these people would agree using free software? I stopped 
> using Max
> because of its restrictive license, and I prefer PD to jMax 
> because it's
> lighter and faster. 
> 
> Most of us don't need fancy segmented patch cords and graphical 
> objectswith a puffy look, but can we focus a little bit on the 
> graphicalinterface issues? I need those Mac addicts to use PD. I 
> like being in
> touch with people on this list, but I also need real people (those 
> I get
> in touch with everyday) to use the same tools than me.
> 
> --
> Marc
> 
> 
> 
> 
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