[PD] interface/pd-based standalone applications question

Michal Seta mis at artengine.ca
Wed Jun 30 21:13:03 CEST 2010


On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 10:44 PM, Mike Moser-Booth
<mmoserbooth at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've always thought that what Max considers standalones is kind of shady.
> They're just the patch and Max Runtime bundled together.

There are 2 ways of distributing patches to those who do not own Max
(or in order to make it more difficult to reverse-engineer the code):

- collective: a bundle of patches which can in turn be distributed as
a file and requires the Max runtime to run (whether an end-user can
actually distribute Max Runtime is a different question, I never
looked into the legal side of this)
- Standalone executable.  In which case the collective is actually
embedded into the executable (minus any media such as audio files
etc,).

> The only difference
> is that the patch(es) used are put together in a single file (which Max
> calls a collective, but anyone with Max can open on their own and edit)

No.  Once the patch has been turned into the collective, another user
will not be able to simply open and edit away (but it is possible if
one has the right tools and knowledge of the file format but then that
falls into the category of reverse-engineering).

> it's nice because it makes
> the patches easier to distribute to people who don't own Max, but it's
> really not much different than just running the patch normally.

I think it is possible to prepare an installer, for any platform, that
contains Pd and all the necessary externals etc. that will
automatically load everything that it needs in order to do its thing.
Each platform will have to deal with this in different way but often a
simple shell script will take care of everything.  This way you can
distribute a "standalone" version of whatever program you have done.

./MiS



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