[PD] Tooltips in Pd-extended 0.43 WAS: no pd?? WTF ????
Hans-Christoph Steiner
hans at at.or.at
Sun Jan 15 23:34:20 CET 2012
On Jan 13, 2012, at 12:59 AM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
>
>> From: Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at at.or.at>
>> To: Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika at yahoo.com>
>> Cc: Max <abonnements at revolwear.com>; pd list <pd-list at iem.at>; Ben Baker-Smith <bbakersmith at gmail.com>
>> Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2012 11:20 PM
>> Subject: Re: Tooltips in Pd-extended 0.43 WAS: no pd?? WTF ????
>>
>>
>> On Jan 12, 2012, at 10:08 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
>>
>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>
>>>> From: Hans-Christoph Steiner <hans at at.or.at>
>>>> To: Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika at yahoo.com>
>>>> Cc: Max <abonnements at revolwear.com>; pd list
>> <pd-list at iem.at>; Ben Baker-Smith <bbakersmith at gmail.com>
>>>> Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2012 8:50 PM
>>>> Subject: Tooltips in Pd-extended 0.43 WAS: no pd?? WTF ????
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> On Jan 12, 2012, at 6:56 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> ----- Original Message -----
>>>>>> From: Max <abonnements at revolwear.com>
>>>>>> To: Jonathan Wilkes <jancsika at yahoo.com>
>>>>>> Cc: Richie Cyngler <glitchpop at gmail.com>; pd list
>>>> <pd-list at iem.at>; Ben Baker-Smith <bbakersmith at gmail.com>
>>>>>> Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2012 7:09 AM
>>>>>> Subject: Re: [PD] no pd?? WTF ????
>>>>>>
>>>>>> And that's not the end of the vicious cycle.
>>>>>> Students who saved their money to buy a Max license are often
>> unwilling
>>>> to
>>>>>> accept that their work could have been done as easy in Pd, and
>>>> sometimes even
>>>>>> better and/or easier.
>>>>>
>>>>> If you think of free
>>>>> software as an ethical issue like I do and are talking about free
>> programs
>>>> that have a
>>>>> proprietary alternative, there is still an important division
>> between those
>>>> programs that are
>>>>> free and superior to their proprietary counterparts on practical
>> grounds,
>>>> and those that
>>>>> don't have the same feature set as their proprietary
>> counterparts (but
>>>> are still quite good).
>>>>>
>>>>> In terms of ease of patching, Pd is clearly in the latter camp--
>> Max has
>>>> infinite undo, a
>>>>> "Tidy Up" that actually _does_ something useful, and a
>> set of
>>>> externals that allows to make
>>>>> multiple connections at once and lots of other shortcuts (maybe
>> these are
>>>> part of the core now,
>>>>> I'm not sure). Plus tooltips, anchors to resize
>> guis/boxes/messages,
>>>> and probably lots of
>>>>> other things that make patching easier.
>>>>>
>>>>> I use Pd and free software (almost) exclusively, but we should be
>> clear
>>>> about which features
>>>>> are available and which are not.
>>>>
>>>> Excellent point.
>>>>
>>>> Speaking of, is your tooltips patch fully functional in Pd-extended
>> 0.43? I
>>>> believe it is included, right? It would be great to ship with that
>> working.
>>>
>>> There was the problem that if you did [loadbang]-[tip 1 blah blah blah(-[s
>> pd-this-canvas.pd]
>>> the label doesn't get the right width. I tried using the
>> <<Loaded>> virtual event and it didn't
>>> work, and then I think you said that the patch should be finished drawing
>> before <<Loaded>>
>>> happens.
>>>
>>> I could just use after idle or update idletasks but those are heavily
>> critiqued on the tcl wiki...
>>
>> 'update' is bad news, but 'after idle' is fine. It just might
>> lead to tricky bugs since things will not necessarily execute in the order you
>> might think.
>
> The "tricky bugs" warning was what made me not want to use 'after idle'. I think
> in another thread you agreed that <<Loaded>> should get triggered after the
> patch is drawn, so a quick and dirty solution would put 'after idle' right before
> the <<Loaded>> virtual event in the relevant proc (with a comment that this isn't
> the best solution). If that sounds like a bad idea, then the tooltips patch shouldn't
> be included until <<Loaded>> works correctly.
>
> Unless there's another solution I'm not thinking of...
Fixing <<Loaded>> is probably a bigger thing than I can manage for the Pd-extended 0.43 release, but patches are welcome. So the question of the moment is: are the tooltips usable enough to leave them in? Do they cause any problems?
.hc
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Free software means you control what your computer does. Non-free software means someone else controls that, and to some extent controls you." - Richard M. Stallman
More information about the Pd-list
mailing list