On Wed, 19 Nov 2003, e skogen wrote:
My 2 cents on PD's gui: I agree that the present gui is minimalistic, but that should maybe be seen as a plus. I would give priority to pd evolving into a full-featured audio/graphics/video processing environment, rather that striving to look cool.
I think it's true that Pd has always put more emphasis on technical features than usability features, and has gotten very powerful very quickly because of this. But when dragging simple GOP abstractions across a fullscreen slows my 750 mhz machine to a crawl, it seems like a technical problem just as much as a usability one.
Having a black and white GUI with simple graphics makes Pd more usable in my opinion. There are other issues with Pd's GUI that make it less usable.
To be honest, I have not looked at Pd's GUI code and I don't know if I'd be able to understand it really. Perhaps there is much that can be done to speed Tcl/tk up. But i'm under the impression that a replacement GUI is still the way to go.
Tcl/Tk may have fallen out of favor these days, but in this situation it works well, except for some optimization issues. tigital is working on porting Tcl/Tk to CoreGraphics on MacOS X, which will make a huge difference in performance. He's already gotten some early versions working.
I recommend trying out Kzrysztof's toxy objects and you'll see that Tcl has some serious advantages. I don't think that it would be easy to have this level of access to the GUI if it was written with wxWindows.
I'm wondering how this would affect externals developers, though? Would new libraries be built to allow easy access to a new Pd GUI? Or would they be expected to learn the new toolkit (wx or not)?
Any object that has anything beyond the standard Pd box would have to be rewritten. It would be a large undertaking on the part of numerous people with only minor, if any, gains. I think it would be much more worthwhile to put that same effort into optimizing Tcl like tigital is.
I suppose it's a lot easier for me to criticize and ask for software changes when I have so little invested in the code!
Indeed. No one is going to stop you from writing your own wx GUI for Pd, in fact, a lot people might help.
.hc
Tcl/tl is very portable and feels responsive enough to me even on my old laptop (Pentium 133) which is not really the best system for realtime audio. I cannot say the same about wxWindows.
You say you cannot say the same about wxWindows. Is that because you have had been results with wxWindows programs, or because you have not used wxWindows before?
-- eric
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