Going through Alex's excellent documentation made me think about how nearly every single new PD user I encounter struggles with OS specific problems when it comes installing externals. As a teacher who introduces a lot of new people to PD - I see this a LOT.

The standard place for putting externals on OSX (~/Library) is hidden by default - and various versions of OSX require various ways of un-hiding.

Similarly the windows path is hard to find - and permissions and view settings need to change to make that folder as well.

So even once the users understand they need to *make* a folder - their OS stops them from making it in the right place. It would be great if that os specific stuff was included - because it's a major stumbling block for a lot of new users.

This can be sort of mediated with by a bunch of clear and easy to find OS specific instructions - but that's hard when OSX keeps changing things etc. I'm happy to write these if that's the best course of action.

Basically it means you need to get deep with your OS, and probably do some google searches to figure out how create a folder in protected system space before deken is actually useful.

Most similar software uses unprotected user space as a default place for installing external libraries. /Documents/Max7, /Documents/Processing/Libraries - etc.

Could we add a location like this to PD's standard search path? Then users could create the folder without jumping through a lot of hoops with their OS.

I understand that users can add a path like this manually - but that's an additional hurdle - and since deken is so tightly integrated, it doesn't seem like that should be necessary. It also causes confusion when you move paths across systems.