[PD] UI developer volunteering to help

marius schebella marius.schebella at gmail.com
Sat May 3 15:41:00 CEST 2008


I think it would be cool, if users had the possibility to decide 
themselves whether they want to use richer graphics display in their 
patches.
to create an interface like in synthmaker, you need for example opengl 
features inside the patcher window. I know that people already do that 
and it seems to work well, but it is not supported by pure pd, one 
reason for which is that the tcl/tk patcher system is too much 
integrated in the pd core.
what is so bad about, if you create [ADSR] that it comes as a nice 
little control gui with all the knobs already included?
it is not true that words are "better" than images. and it is not true 
that more information in a patch means "better".
I think you are right from the viewpoint of a programming user, but 
users that just want higher level usuability want better graphics at 
least the *possibility* to add graphical UI features. but this is quite 
a lot of work...

a good example for me are web-pages. you really don't want to read all 
the code behind. you want it to work and have a nice UI.
with pd you also want a nice interface for the "performing" situation.

btw. we need to make pd run in a browser environment.

marius.


Frank Barknecht wrote:
> Hallo,
> Langsam Wieder hat gesagt: // Langsam Wieder wrote:
> 
>> if you want to collect some ideas how a real usable and pretty
>> interface for a modular environment could look like, have a look at
>> http://synthmaker.co.uk/about.html
>> it's got bendable links... you never have to leave edit mode... and
>> have a look at how ALL interface elements as bitmap & vector knobs,
>> sliders or wavedraw display consist of modules themselve.
>> the environment is off course not as powerful as pd, but the interface
>> is just a joy to work with.
> 
> I've never worked with that, however I'm always irritated, when
> patching environments have their cord connections flow left to right
> instead of top to bottom. IMO that's such a waste of space in
> languages, that are written horizontally. If you look at the "Midi to
> Poly" object here: http://synthmaker.co.uk/images/components%20L.png
> you'll see that most of it is just an empty grey rectangle, whose
> width is just there to make room for the object name. If the
> in/outlets were top and bottom as in Pd and Max, the box could be much
> smaller without losing any information.
> 
> Of course if objects are just icons instead of works, left-to-right
> can work, but as Matju once said: "a word says more than a thousand
> pictures" - icons are very limited. No wonder, SynthMaker also
> includes a (quite nice) text editor for dsp code. 
> 
> Ciao





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