[PD] shortcuts for patching

[c]

On Sun Jun 04, 2006 at 11:34:21AM +0900, hard off wrote:
> something that would really help me is if you could click and drag on
> the canvas, and then all the cables in that area would be selected.

i made an experimental PD-gui in TCL last summer, with plans to hook into the desireData server.. cables are full-fledged objects (give each one a differnet width and color if you want) lassoable (or toggle between cables and the objects they touch with tab), snap to grid with adjustable resolution, property inspector, freely zommable canvas, input to all selected widgets (Eg bang 10 buttons at once, move 10 sliders, align things horizontally by selecting them and entering '10' for the x position in the inspector), and some other things i probably forget. it was about 40 K of TCL code when i abandoned it since pd didnt work on my hardware so there was little point in continuing.. 


much of the features were inspired by that max .mov, but really adobe illustrator had all of them in 1988..

as soon pd works on my hardware i'll investigate refactoring the code a bit to use ObjectiveTCL (as in DesireData) so that objects can be used in either (since in the meantime ive added some OSC stuff so that it doesnt need PD to run and can just be used as a frontend to Om-Synth/SooperLooper, etc)


most of these usability fixes are pretty trivial once the GUI is not dealing with linked lists in C in the DSP thread. so we're on the right track. im sure development would be alot faster if we could get paid to work on it, instead of wasting so much time worrying how to make ends meet by fixing computers for musicians, building websites, or whatever else it is people do to make money instead of work on cool free software...


the only real downside to using TCL/Tk is you need an extra layer of abstraction between the canvas coordinates, since it doesnt natively support scaling and zooming the entire canvas (QT's Canvas does this AFAIK, and of course you can do anything with an openGL viewpoint..) and theres no way you can really display video inline in the patch without non-portable X hacks.. neither of these things stand in the way of the massive headroom for improvements over pd's old gui (imo it should have used QuickDraw, and X Pixmaps, since all uses Tk for is draw line segments)..


> 
> someone else also posted a really cool little animated gif that showed
> an object being inserted into the middle of a patch cord, so there was
> no need to sever the cord, add the object, then remake 2 patch cords.
> 
> also totally agree that having to rewire all my [route] [trigger]
> [select]  outlets when i add a new  argument is annoying.  but
> recoding these objects looks pretty tricky.
> 
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