Hi Steve,
Steve Peach wrote:
In Max/MSP you can save (compile) your patches into various plug-ins or applications. I was wondering can this be done in Pd (which is what I use at home) If it can , could someone let me know please, it would be MUCH!!! appreciated
Max/MSP and other commercial softwares make stand-alone apps in order to get around the fact that each copy of the program is licensed to one machine, or to hide the structure of work made with them. Being free and open source, PD lacks that ability. To get the same functionality, you would simply have to distribute your patch with a version of PD suited for whatever platform you wanted it to run on (don't forget the externals!). This is a lot less simple than making a standalone, however. Perhaps a simpler solution would be to make sure your PD patch works with one of the available installers and distribute it with that. The benefit of the situation is that whoever gets your patch is free to open it up and change it if they like, an option which is unavailable with commercial stand-alones.
As far as plugins, you could check out PDVST to get PD running as a VST/VSTi under windows:
http://crca.ucsd.edu/~jsarlo/pdvst/
Besides running PD in a VST host, you could also run it alongside whatever other app you are using, and connect them together using OSC for data, MIDI for control and JACK for audio (if you are on Linux or OSX). This should approximate most of what you would gain from having a true plug-in system, except maybe for presets and BPM syncing (both of which could be programmed into your PD patches with some work). It's not Pluggo, but it's not useless either.
good luck, d.