[PD] Announcing "Cyclone 0.3 alpha-1"

[Alexandre Torres Porres]

Howdy, we (me, derek and matt) are really excited to finally announce the
release of a first alpha version of cyclone 0.3


Cyclone: A set of Pure Data objects cloned from Max/MSP

   - Cyclone expands Pure Data with objects cloned from cycling74's
   Max/MSP. It thus provides some good level of compatibility between the two
   environments, helping users of both systems in the development of
   equivalent patches.


In february 21st of 2016, active development for cyclone 0.2 was abandoned,
so we started working on a 0.3 version release in our repository <
https://github.com/porres/pd-cyclone>. Hence, we've been working on this
release for exactly one year; and in this anniversary celebration, we're
putting out a release! Pre alpha versions started popping up for download
in our repository in late september of 2016, now we finally move on to
another phase and get really close to a final release.

The main focus of the currently development is on updating objects to newer
versions of Max. We're also rewriting the documentation, fixing bugs and
introducing new objects. So far, we have:

- 60 updated objects;
- 54 fixed objects (including objects that were and were not updated);
- 46 new objects;
- A newly written documentation, from scratch (fixing numerous issues)

*About updating cyclone to the latest Max version:*

Cyclone development started in april of 2002 (at the time of Max 4.0) with
its original author Krzysztof Czaja, who abandoned it in 2005 at version
0.1alpha55, leaving a great and huge library, but still compliant to Max
4.0! Cyclone ended up incorporated to Pd-Extended, under the
maintenance of Hans-Christoph
Steiner, where it only a had a minor update in 2013 (0.1alpha56) - right
before Cyclone and Pd Extended were abandoned altogether. Under a new
maintenance phase, Fred Jan Kraan released "cyclone 0.2beta" in late 2015,
still closely related to the latest 0.1alpha releases, meaning that only
minor updates were made and that the library was still mostly outdated to
Max 4.0.

At the time of this release, Max is in version 7.3.2, and  64 objects in
Cyclone needed updates in order to be compliant to this version. So far, 60
objects have already been updated and the only remaining 4 are: [zl],
[table], [seq] and [comment] ([comment] is the only object that will not
receive a full update, but only a partial update to Max 5).

*About other stuff:*

Besides updating the objects, we're also introducing new objects to the
library, rewriting the whole documentation and fixing lots of bugs. There
are 46 new objects (some still experimental, and 54 objects had bugs fixed
(this includes about half of the objects that were also updated) - it's
likely though that some "bugs" that were fixed in objects listed as not
updated might have been feature additions and changes not specified in the
documentation in more recent versions of max.

For further beta and final releases of cyclone 0.3, we need to update the 4
remaining objects, work a bit more on some of newly introduced objects and
revise once more the documentation (yet to include "meta" and related
objects). We also have a fair list of bug fixes we hope to take care of as
well. Hopefully this won't take another year or so :)

A fully detailed changelog in comparison to "cyclone 0.2 beta", plus a list
of things "To Do" and roadmaps for the future (cyclone 0.4) is presented
here https://github.com/porres/pd-cyclone/wiki/cyclone-0.3-changlelog

*Installing "Cyclone 0.3 alpha 1":*

*Cyclone 0.3 alpha 1* has been tested with Pd Vanilla 0.47-1, not
guaranteed to work in any other version or in other flavors such as Pd
Extended / Pd-l2ork and Purr Data. We've uploaded to deken, so simply use
the "find externals" option in the Help menu of Pd vanilla and you'll see
it there for Linux, Windows and Mac OS... ("arm", coming soon) - you can
also download it from https://github.com/porres/pd-cyclone/releases

For more details, see https://github.com/porres/
pd-cyclone/wiki/How-To-Install

*Final remarks:*

Please check our repository, you will find more information and details
about cyclone https://github.com/porres/pd-cyclone

Please report any bug or issue you may run into here:
https://github.com/porres/pd-cyclone/issues

Taking care of Cyclone is a great deal of work, we could use some help...
if you wanna collaborate with us, please get in touch!

And for last, there's been some discussion here and there about possible
conflicts between our repository/development and early
repositories/versions of cyclone. We have answered and discussed that in
our repository in an issue that is now resolved and closed, but I'm
concerned if the discussion ended up constrained to only a few people. So
I'm referring the issue here https://github.com/porres/pd-cyclone/issues/27 so
more people may be aware of it - we're still available to discuss that or
anything else if that's the case.


cheers
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