[PD] Pd OS X installer with Iemlib and Zexy

[Hans-Christoph Steiner]

On Dec 9, 2004, at 8:34 AM, derek holzer wrote:

> Hi Martin,
>
> martin pichlmair wrote:
>
>>> speaking of this OSX installer, is it just me or are other people 
>>> really annoyed with the new drop down "help" menu in this version. 
>>> If you are looking for a specifc file in a folder, like in 
>>> 5.reference, it takes forever and a day to scroll there!
>> no it is not just you. on the other hand having a place to find all 
>> installed objects (if each of them got a help patch) is quite a good 
>> thing. especially for newbies. it is a sad thing that most help 
>> patches do not feature a library name otherwise ordering them would 
>> be easy - there is also no mechanism where it should be stored beside 
>> doing so in the filename (or directory structure).
>> so: if you can think of a solution on how it works better you are 
>> sure welcome to propose it. until then hcs did the best possible.
>
> Yes, of course, it is inconvienient that there's no way of knowing 
> which library the objects come from. This namespace debate is taking 
> on relgious proportions in some circles. But, the main thing which I 
> found a PITA was simply that the "help" menu didn't open up a normal 
> file-browsing window anymore, but tried to make a scrollable dropdown 
> of all the files there. In which case, I would simply suggest to 
> return to the older model, which is *slightly* more usable [but not 
> much ;-) ]
>
> OTOH, if the help files were organized into folders [as Zexy, PDP, GEM 
> and some others sometimes do, albeit inconsistantly in different 
> cases], it would make the scrolling easier. But if the user doesn't 
> know which Lib it comes from, it is just as unusable. The other 
> problem is with paths, which have to be set no matter what installer 
> is used. For new users, this really creates a lot of confusion!
>
> Just thinking about this a bit after two workshops of 12-15 PD 
> newbies, which are about 75% OSXers with their own laptops, and having 
> to do new installs with all of them.
>

This menu is far from ideal, but Apple recently made it so that you 
can't open a normal file browser if the directory is inside an .app 
wrapper.  Its a bummer.  Therefore, the cascasing menus.

Organizing by library is a bad idea, I think, since most of the library 
names have no logical organizing principle except the person who wrote 
the objects.

I am open to suggestions as to how the Help menu could be done better.  
Miller did a kludge using symbolic links to get the old behavior 
working, but I think it'll be troublesome in the long run, so we should 
figure something out, hopefully something that applies to all platforms 
well.

.hc

                                   http://at.or.at/hans/