I just made a nbx matrix* and I'm curious if could be better make this with data structures (by now i will prefere this approach because most of people I distribute my patches uses pd-extended0.41, but I will start some tests)...
When there's a lot of ds-gui's in motion, they don't react as quickly as iem-gui objects would. I would assume they use more CPU but haven't done any tests.
Data-structures would give you more flexibility in some areas, less in others. For example, you can quickly change the number of rows and columns, but you can't set the range for drawnumber, and there's no easy way to plot arrrays vertically.
See the attached for a quick mockup. I tried making it a two-dimensional array, but that causes extreme flickering. You can put the drawpolygon object in pd-$0-row to simulate an nbox although doing so makes them mobile. You could also implement a global show/hide toggle using the -v flag to avoid audio dropouts.
Also: you can select each column in edit mode and shuffle them around, then click the "sort" message to reorder them from left to right.
-Jonathan
*attached, please test...
thanks glerm