[PD] First instrument

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Tue, 25 Jul 2006, padawan12 wrote:

> It works exactly as you describe, nice start into Pd. The only gripe is 
> that you use number boxes as temporary storage values. I think this is 
> frowned upon because it can slow down the patch depending on the graphic 
> capability of the machine if you update them. The "better" method is to 
> use ordinary float boxes and if you want to see what values are there 
> connect numbers only as displays (ie not in the control signal path)

Yes, that's one reason, and another one is that because it biases your 
patch toward one way of visualizing your data, meaning that if you want to 
see your data otherwise, you have to use two ways of visualizing your 
data, because one is hardcoded in the patch.

In most any case, any abstraction which is not itself a visualizer for 
another abstraction, should have inlets/methods for setting data and
outlet(s) for getting data, whereas anything aimed directly at the 
user is purely optional and would be better off being a separate 
abstraction.

I like the concept of a non-GUI object being two-way-connected to a GUI 
object, or else a GUI object containing a non-GUI object acting as a 
user-oriented wrapper for that non-GUI object. The first of those two 
options is more flexible because the non-GUI object is not hardcoded, 
so the GUI part can be used with different non-GUI objects, provided 
that the non-GUI objects follow the same conventions.

(non-GUI vs GUI objects is also often called Model vs View.)

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801 - http://artengine.ca/matju
| Freelance Digital Arts Engineer, Montréal QC Canada