I am using vanilla nowadays and i was wondering if someone has arrived at an elegant way of simulating the X/Y control of the grid object that used to reside in unauthorized? I would like to get at least that smooth blend of x/y with one knob/control and i am curious if others have made something to replace it or have an abs that can simulate what i was sharing 

Check out the pure vanilla [touch] object in the Droidparty abstractions: http://www.droidparty.net

This also has the benefit that it will be rendered as an XY object in both Droidparty & PdParty.

Also 
is it possible to run GEM via vanilla on a mac? 
I'm running Pd 0.47.1  with osx 10.11.6

Yes. Install GEM via deken.

after grabbing it with deken it still does not work so i am wondering if there is a stash of binaries for it somewhere?

I believe you need to both add the Gem std path and libs to the startup options. Search on the list.

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Dan Wilcox
@danomatika
danomatika.com
robotcowboy.com