When I see stuff like fancy icons etc, I'm always a bit afraid that those of us on low res machines (1024x768 in my case) would get really screwed in the end as one cool, large, fancy, chromey module would take up half the screen! IMO tiny pd boxes are always better as they save space and increase whitespace, increasing readability ... and a well named abstraction is more powerful then loads of graphics. Those signal inlet, outlet signs in SynthMaker are annoyingly large too, whereas in PD a thicker line is completely obvious enough.
I guess it all comes down to who PD is aimed at ... people who need a fancy interface or people who want to get some work done. (ohhh I went there!)
What I would like would be a unified set of common interface elements as already suggested. A better [knob] would be nice for instance
2 bits
On Sat, 2008-05-03 at 12:21 +0200, Frank Barknecht wrote:
Hallo, Langsam Wieder hat gesagt: // Langsam Wieder wrote:
if you want to collect some ideas how a real usable and pretty interface for a modular environment could look like, have a look at http://synthmaker.co.uk/about.html it's got bendable links... you never have to leave edit mode... and have a look at how ALL interface elements as bitmap & vector knobs, sliders or wavedraw display consist of modules themselve. the environment is off course not as powerful as pd, but the interface is just a joy to work with.
I've never worked with that, however I'm always irritated, when patching environments have their cord connections flow left to right instead of top to bottom. IMO that's such a waste of space in languages, that are written horizontally. If you look at the "Midi to Poly" object here: http://synthmaker.co.uk/images/components%20L.png you'll see that most of it is just an empty grey rectangle, whose width is just there to make room for the object name. If the in/outlets were top and bottom as in Pd and Max, the box could be much smaller without losing any information.
Of course if objects are just icons instead of works, left-to-right can work, but as Matju once said: "a word says more than a thousand pictures" - icons are very limited. No wonder, SynthMaker also includes a (quite nice) text editor for dsp code.
Ciao
Dan Wilcox robotcowboy.com