> then i guess such a circle can have (animated) inlets/outlets and "modulate" other guis and so on... nice

That would essentially let you do a fancier version of GOP abstractions where you'd have more control over the visual appearance. I decided not to get into that because a) people seem to get by with GOP abstractions ok, b) you can draw scalars in a GOP window (though it's unnecessarily complex and buggy), and c) making scalars "patchable" probably opens up a big can of worms. And even if you get all that right, there's still the issue of what to do about ds arrays. But if a dev fairy magically implemented it I'd be happy. :)

There's also the possibility to have something like [draw inlet] which would receive messages the way [struct] does for mouse events. On the face of it that seems like a more efficient/elegant approach than creating a canvas for each scalar. But practically specaking I don't see a use for it-- either you have a small enough number scalars that the overhead of canvases doesn't matter, or you have so many scalars (or array elements) that it'd be impractical to make xlet connections to each of them.

-Jonathan