Hallo, Chris McCormick hat gesagt: // Chris McCormick wrote:
Almost all visual improvements are going to be subjective. That is to say, for every suggestion someone makes along the lines of visual changes to Pd, there will be many people for the change and many people against. For that reason, please put in the time to make all changes configurable, so that those who like the current look of Pd can easily put in command line flags or .pdrc settings to make it looks the way it does now. Ideally this would be something like "-originalgui". As for the default look, that could be decided by majority vote I guess.
I very much support that approach. What looks good or is helpful is a very personal decision. We already had a heated discussion about which fonts to choose and I'd rather not repeat this for every other aspect of Pd, this would be counter-productive and bind too many resources better wasted elsewhere. ;)
The only way a GUI overhaul can work in the long run IMO is to make a configuration system. This actually probably should not be a command line flag like "-originalgui" or "-newgui", but a new configuration file for themes that can be loaded with "-theme" or so. This is the approach that works for most other applications as well (Firefox, Gtk, etc.) All that Pd would need to supply is some hooks for setting various things like colors for canvas-BG, thickness of signal/msg-cords, (or even fonts, though this may be tricky) etc. Then the config file would just list the values for these variables, maybe in simple Tcl-syntax (no XML!). But please don't enforce huge GUI choices on all users.
Frank Barknecht _ ______footils.org__