[PD] IntelMacs & PD/GEM

[james tittle]

On Jan 17, 2006, at 2:38 PM, chris clepper wrote:

> On 1/17/06, derek holzer <derek at x-i.net> wrote:
>> Although I have
>> seen situations using a firewire camera where a GEM patch suddenly  
>> eats
>> 2-300% of the CPU it used every other time you ran it, which I  
>> suspect
>> has something to do with the drivers used.
>
> Which firewire camera do you see that with?  I have used many (iSight,
> iBot, ImagingSource, etc) and not had that problem.  Can you reliably
> reproduce it?  If so then post a patch to the list and I can look into
> it.

...yep, the only problem I've seen that isn't solved by unplugging  
and replugging the camera is the well known problem with  
[pdp_ieee1394], and this is due to copy/paste misuse of the Quicktime  
SequenceGrabber API (you can't run SGIdle() in a seperate thread)...

>> „THERE IS ALSO AN EXPERIMENTAL PORT TO MAC-OSX"
>>
>> does not quite sound like what you described. actually it scared  
>> me  from
>> using Gem quite a bit, until franz of the sat told me that it's   
>> not true.
>
> It's about as experimental as the rest of Pd, which does scare off a
> few folks.  I often hear that because there is no company peddling Pd,
> it is 'unsupported' and 'unstable'.  Oh well.
>
> Someone should update that IEM page and remove that line.  The link to
> my page can probably go since it is pretty out of date as well.

...yep, that page hasn't been updated in at least 2 years:  going  
further than what chris says, I'd add that gem on osx is more stable  
than pd's audio system on osx!  As usual, this comes from the fact  
that the osx developers' interests tend more to using pd as a  
graphics rather than an audio instrument...audio is actually on my  
new year's to-do list, so we'll see...

...as a sidenote, despite some osx tcl/tk improvements, there's still  
lots of room to go:  I mean, we are emulating XWindows calls on a  
wholly different display system...with that in mind, I'd like to  
remind everyone that there's no real reason to use the aqua tcl/tk:   
pd works a bit better when using the x11 tcl/tk (certainly looks more  
like the linux version)...and the good part is that even doing this,  
the GEM & gridflow windows still output to native osx opengl (pdp/3dp  
coming soon!)

l8r,
james