james tittle wrote:

...don't know if ya got this during your email probs yesterday:

no i didn't get it, thanks for the forward

i split my answers in several mails...

Begin forwarded message:

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From: james tittle tigital@mac.com Date: March 27, 2006 11:06:58 AM EST To: IOhannes m zmoelnig zmoelnig@iem.at Cc: gem-dev gem-dev@iem.at Subject: Re: [GEM-dev] Re: [GEM-cvs] Gem/src/Base GemSIMD.cpp, NONE, 1.1 GemSIMD.h, 1.3, 1.4

On Mar 24, 2006, at 4:32 PM, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:

...

usually only one single instance of GemSIMD will be created during the life-cycle of Gem, serving as an initialization of the cpu-check. this instantiation is done in GemMan (right after the splash-screen).

...splash screen? I saw this committed, but what's the idea of it? Is this something to come up when Gem is loaded? Or when a gemwin is opened?

oh, by "splash-screen" i mean the lines displayed on the pd-console when you have sucessfully loaded Gem: the one with "GEM: Graphics Environment for Multimedia" and all the authors.

however, i have recently committed a (yet empty) Geo-object "GemSplash". the reasoning behind this is, that it would be nice to to make an object [Gem] which you can put somewhere in your patch in order to load the library "Gem". of course you can do that (loading Gem via an object [Gem]) already, but the object creation will fail, because there is no such object within the library. this can be fixed in various ways, e.g. create an object with no inlets and outlets (just like the iemlib does it). then i thought it would be good to use the existing framework to include this object; however, you cannot just create an object "Geos/Gem.cpp" because you will get naming conflicts with the auto-registering macro magic. so i thought there i would just make another object which has an alias "Gem".

furthermore i thought, it would be nice if this object could do something. the first idea that came to my mind was a Geo that would display some info on Gem (in the gem-window), kind of a "splash-screen" with more or less the same information as is given on the console when loading.

i don't like the idea of a "real" splash-screen (something that pops up and that you cannot disable), but if the user is given the choice to include it (who would want that, i wonder) it would be nice.

so i created a (still empty) Geo-object "GemSplash" (to avoid the name problem) and aliased it to "Gem". now you could just connect a [gemhead] to the [Gem] and it should (in future times) display something cool.

however, i haven't found the time to actually put something in there, esp. as this object should - must - not rely on anything installed on the computer apart from pd/Gem, which makes text display a bit wearisome.

a continuative (what a word...) idea was, that we could do community based competitions for this splash screen, which would change for each release (considering a release cycle of 2 years we should be able to find at least _one_ person who would create such object for each release ;-))

of course this is a bit weird, as this object would have to be coded directly in C++ which somehow contradicts the paradigm of using objects...

what do you think?

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