Hi Dan,
To sum up we've made a break from the fork, ppp is very different in the sense that it's used to publish binaries, and we didn't keep the base functionnality of a list of patches that you can load at will : one project = one patch = one app.
It's not made to replace droidparty at all, it's more about synching standalone apps built with pd with one another, and hopefully any other kind of midi gear.
It explains which abstractions we kept from droidparty and what we added (mainly the clock one - that is interfaced with a java implementation of a raw midi clock) - still some stuff to document there ... but it will give you an overview.
For the gui part, we added support for the missing gui objects of pd (arrays, radios ...), made a system to use tabs, and a system to override behavior and looks with java code - those overrides are meant to be written by contributors/developp and can be used with a simple declaration when publishing (in java again).
To port all of this stuff back to droidparty would be a lot of work.
Concerning you issue thread :
- ribbon : how is it really different from slider ? it only has a different look right ?
- the knob would be a square slider in pd with a graphical and behavior override when used in android (we have an implementation but it's not used anywhere).
- In android the taplist can also open an android-style popup for you to choose from instead of cycling through a list at each tap, in pd the taplist is the same as it was (plus the fix about symetric messages, and we added a label - for gui theming purposes).
- we dropped the features to add images to android menus, we will use the android menu later on.
- we kept the touch as is.
Cheers !