Hello all,
Long time lurker, first time e-mailer. I get the digest version of these e-mails so apologies if I'm not responding to the thread correctly.
I'm mostly active on the PD FB group and have been working with Alexandre on updating cyclone, I've done a control rate pong so far and I'm finishing up control and audio rate rounds, and he suggested I poke my head in. I haven't been keeping up with the list that well but he gave me a gist of the ongoings of this thread.
I used to use OS X mainly and used Max a lot (last version I heavily used was 6) but about a year/year and a half ago got bit by the open-source bug in a major way, wiped my hd, installed Ubuntu and never looked back. I do miss a lot of features of Max (particularly matrixctrl, but I really don't know how the GUI side of PD works) but at the same time appreciate that PD is its own beast. I don't quite remember how soundfiles worked in Max, but I really dig the PD approach to them in that everything is an array and I like the C-like structs, although I haven't quite utilized them in my own work quite yet. Maybe it's because PD is more spare object-wise or maybe it's just that I've had more time to learn about programming and DSP-related things, but working in PD feels less boxing-glovesy than working in Max. That being said, I don't necessarily advocate an object-by-object port of any version of Max, I don't want to see PD become a Max ripoff, but at the same time I think PD can take a lot of inspiration from some of the functionality of Max, esp. GUI-wise. Furthermore, it would be nice to have some of that Max-inspired functionality centered in a common library easily available to PD users. I remember in older days making patches for people and just telling them to download PD-extended since I knew all the objects I used were included in that particular flavor. Anyways, I digress. I think it'd be a good idea to at least maintain libraries like Cyclone and make sure that their documentation is clear and accessible and while we're at it, update Cyclone with some of the newer Max ideas, either direct ports or inspired by objects. The graphical programming paradigm and Max have evolved a lot since Max 4 and I don't see the harm in taking advantage of these new developments and putting them into PD.
Derek