On Dec 5, 2007, at 1:04 PM, Martin Peach wrote:
B. Bogart wrote:
Ah segmented patch coords again.
How about a real solution to the problem of routing objects in
diagrams? In PD this could mean a few things:
- Best patching practise!!! Often you can choose not to overlap
objects and connections just by arranging objects as the connections force
you to, which gives you the valuable side-effect of having the
position of object show the flow of the patch more clearly.
- Empirical tests have shown that curved (spline) connections
between nodes are actually the best way to make them easier to follow, so yay for spline/curved connections and nay for segments! (See p193, figure 6.8 in "Information Visualization: Perception for Design" by Colin
Ware.)
- I noticed the new inkscape has some very fancy graph drawing
features, one of which is the ability to tell connections to automatically route around nodes. They are not curved, but the
idea of a PD where connections simply avoid objects themselves has a lot of potential.Of course I'm not saying adding the choice is necessarily a bad
thing, but the real question is what nurtures best practise? That remains
to be seen, but I'd be very surprised if segmented connections were it.And how about patch cords that start out one colour and end up
another with a smooth blend all the way along? Then you could identify different
cords as well as know which way they were going.
Color really makes things stand out, especially in a black and white
patch. So my question is, what would this color fade be
communicating? A fade would stand out even more than a solid color,
IMHO. What is that fade communicating and is it more important that
other elements, like the object box, the inlets/outlets, the text in
the boxes, etc.
The ability to raise or lower objects as in Max ("bring to front",
"send to back") and also to have the cords run behind them would be nice. Not sure how much of this is feasible in tk though...also the pd
file format would need to be modified to include patch cord colours and object
drawing order.
It's easy to do in Tk, the hard part would be to make Pd handle it,
meaning save and restore that information. That wouldn't be so hard
to code, I suspect it would be harder to get it accepted into core.
.hc
Martin
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