I think that probably one of the most valuable things I could contribute to right now is the pd-lib project, as there is a huge community of sharing Max patches out there. Is anyone here a participant in that project? I think that one valuable contribution to that by someone who is not a coder and who has access to Max/MSP is for them to spec the unimplemented Max externals functionality to make it easier for people like me (ie, with no mac) to add them to PD-Lib. Is there something like this going on already?
I am also one of the early pd-lib developers. I'm not sure what happened to that project. It just kind of faded away when we got busy with other things I think. It would be great if someone detailed the opcode max object functions. I would be interested in continuing with development, but my access to Macintosh is about to go away (hurray!). Does anyone know if the Max manual is online somewhere?
The next thing that I think needs done is an updated GUI. Silly as it is to me, the fact is that lots and lots of musicians get instantly turned off by the "old-skool" nature of PD's gui. It's kind of sad, but many people can't get beyond that to see that, though a little uglier, PD is easily functionally competitive, and that is the real important fact.
I've been recently thinking about making a new GUI using the "obj" and "connect" message that you can send to canvases. The problem is that right now there is no "destroy" or "disconnect" functions. But don't let me stop you. I'm not really all that excited about making a GUI, it's just an idea I'm kicking around.
-- __________________________ | | Joseph A. Sarlo | Computer Music Dept. | Peabody Conservatory | Johns Hopkins University | | jsarlo@peabody.jhu.edu |__________________________