[PD] Unified Library was Re: Call for GSoC mentors! March 9th deadline!

[Frank Barknecht]

Hallo,
hard off hat gesagt: // hard off wrote:

> none of the libraries are very good general all-purpose toolkits though, in
> my opinion.  i guess that's mainly because none of them have really been
> designed as general toolkits.  there is heaps of good stuff in rjdj, but
> it's all for the phone, which has no pd GUI component. 

Well, the RjDj patches (scenes) are written on a computer as well.

The focus on GUI-less objects so far is by design: I believe, that we
need to have basic building blocks *without* GUI first (maybe you
remember the list thread about a dsp or "tilde" library? That had an
influence on the RjDj design). Later we can decorate any abstraction
with GUIs, provided the basic block offer a standardized communication
interface.

In RjDj the rightmost inlet in (most) abstractions is this interface:
This inlet accepts tagged messages like "freq <num>" or "delay <num>"
or "note <num> <num>". RjDjlib includes a handful of custom GUI
elements which just are GOP wrappers around sliders, numbers etc. that
automatically create these messages. For example you can create a 
[g_hsl freq 0 22050] to get a slider GUI, that will have a range of
0...22050 and outputs messages like "freq <value>" and can be set with
"freq <val>" messages to its inlet.

The g_* abstractions in RjDj all can be chained: 

 [g_hsl pitch 0 127]
 |
 [g_hsl vel 0 127]
 |
 [g_hradio octave 4]
 |
 [mycoolsynthesiszer]

so GUIs can be built in a consistent way and they can even be reused
in parts.

Having the GUI separate from the DSP abstraction also makes polyphony
easy: You can use just one GUI to control many voices in a synth.

Ciao
-- 
 Frank Barknecht            Do You RjDj.me?          _ ______footils.org__