Hi Marc, i'm still working mostly with Max/MSP because of the mentioned optical issues. (i don't care about segmented patch cords but there are many more reasons why Max is preferable, for example colors, fonts, free box sizes, patcher in a box, poly~). There's currently (at least for me) no way to make intuitive performance patches with PD. The other thing is that audio performance (e.g. latency) and flexibility of Max/MSP is better in most cases. However there are other reasons why i'm interested in PD. It's free, it's lightweight and it's much more stable. In this sense, i do use PD for sound installations and the likes. The most prominent advantage is of course the principal point that one can take peek into the code, spot problems or modify it according to one's needs.
I've complained a few times that PD suffers (to my mind) from the following problems:
- source code documentation is hardly existent, hence it cost me a lot of to
understand what it's going on in there.
- there is a nasty entanglement of the messaging/dsp core with the GUI
subsystem
- the current TCL/TK GUI hinders all kind of interesting GUI stuff
- the audio-IO is not changeable at run-time (... i heard this will change
in 0.37)
- installation and configuration is still notoriously complicated for people
that are not that familiar with system issues
The change of the GUI is the most important thing and all i can say is that i'm working on it. There are a lot of things that need to be changed for that and there are other things that should be changed at the same time. My vision is a true modular system with the well-functioning messaging and DSP core of PD (and an API to query and interface it) and strictly separated IO, GUI and networking subsystems. A change like that would not necessarily break all backward-compatibility (except those a graphical externals). I'm working on these things but i'm not sure if they'll make it into the PD development branches. I started on restructuring everything and i'm not sure if it's still PD when that process is finished. (or maybe i fail on doing it)
best greetings, Thomas
----- Original Message ----- From: "Marc Lavallée" odradek@videotron.ca To: "pd-list" pd-list@iem.kug.ac.at Sent: Wednesday, February 12, 2003 5:32 PM Subject: [PD] PD usability
I had a strange conversation yesterday with a teacher who basically said that free software sucks because of usability issues, and that he'll refuse to teach Pure Data because Max is vastly superior at the cognitive level. The segmented patch cord functionnality seems to be of major importance to him. He also seemed quite revolted by the installation process of the OSX version. So to him, the whole idea of free software is simply irrelevent. This man (who call himself an anarchist, go figure) is telling all those young people that they must pay a fortune to get a fancy Mac and a Max/MSP/Jitter licence.
I'm the only one in my community to use free software for multimedia production. I'd really like my people to use free software, but they simply don't want to, because the very second they are in touch with "no so easy to use" softwares, they almost puke. How could we make PD better so these people would agree using free software? I stopped using Max because of its restrictive license, and I prefer PD to jMax because it's lighter and faster.
Most of us don't need fancy segmented patch cords and graphical objects with a puffy look, but can we focus a little bit on the graphical interface issues? I need those Mac addicts to use PD. I like being in touch with people on this list, but I also need real people (those I get in touch with everyday) to use the same tools than me.
-- Marc
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