Frank Barknecht wrote:
Hallo, Chris McCormick hat gesagt: // Chris McCormick wrote:
I'm really digging the direction this is going. If I could just chip my 2c into the fray: I have to agree with Frank that being able to select a tower of object boxes and then click a key combination to connect them by patch cords would be useful, as would a keystroke to auto-space things horizontally or vertically. I also agree with Tim that Blender's same-key select/deselect toggle feels very natural. I would vote for ctrl-A both selecting all and deselecting all.
Here's Chun and Matju's pd~conv paper: "Keyboard-only Interface For Pure Data" http://artengine.ca/~catalogue-pd/18-Lee-Bouchard.pdf
In general I think, Pd should not try to outsmart the user. Finding the most "stupid" solutions to problems has been a good guideline in the past IMO.
Autoplacement and autoconnections maybe should be more stupid in this regard: Instead of trying to make them figure out on their own when they should be applied, they could be explict operations that a user has to start actively. This transfers the obligation to be smart from the program to the user, who in general is smarter than software anyway. Personally I don't like software that tries to be smarter than me, that's why I don't run OS-X or Windows. ;)
So instead of doing auto-placements and connections as default, user-initiated operations should be preferred, i.e. a better "Tidy up" and a "Connect all selected objects" as proposed.
but wouldn't it be nice to have shortcuts for all the combinations that you have to type 10 times a day? for example I create [metro] and then a auto-completion shortcut will add a connected toggle? or cycle through a set of recently used combinations with that object? [openpanel] always goes with a bang input. default pd-auto-completion could directly be taken from the help patch for the object or a list of standard combinations for this object. marius.
Additionally placing objects is such a natural operation for mouse actions and that overriding the mouse actions with an automatism should be approached very carefully.
That's just my opinion of course and open to debate.
Ciao