hi marc,
I'm not really sure I understand what you want. Do you need some rethoric ammo to convince people to - ahem - switch[tm] (or [switch~]) ? Or do you want to discuss / start a flamewar about the various flavours of max ?
At least I can see some confusion between
of os
ease of installation (= technical skill) of sw
fancy look,feel (= taste)
actual usability (= socialization)
I don't use max/msp because I find the look and feel and usability of osx very crappy (for _me_), at least I have terminal window now but it takes about 6 secs to show up (0.2 on my stoneage g3 running debian) and I don't want to put several afternoons into figuring out how to turn off all these cpu consuming special fx.
I read:
I had a strange conversation yesterday with a teacher who basically said that free software sucks because of usability issues, and that he'll
rubbish, I don't know how hard it is to install redhat and download the planet stuff but ./configure make && su -c "make install" surely isn't the steepest learning curve out there
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.
if you can't do good looking, intuitive and easy to maintain patches without hiding/segmenting patchcords you basically didn't get the point of graphical programming, go back sit down and rearrange, abstract and clean up.
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.
sure max/msp/jitter has some features pd lacks (but this holds also true the other way round) but the major advantage of free software is access to the sources (no more waiting 4 days on a mailing list just to be told that there is a hardcoded limit of n whatevers in the source just for example), having access to the guts of my tools is so important to me by now that I stop reading announcements for software that sounded quite nice when I get to the point where they tell me it's binary only but free for non-commercial use.
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.
unix is user friendly - it's just a little bit picky about who it's friends are
How could we make PD better
it's great the way it is, well a callback based jack implementation maybe ...
so these people would agree using free software? I stopped using Max
fine, but why shouldn't other people choose to use max/msp or jmax (non-free java - but a very clean design) or director or VB or whatever ?
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.
there ain't much I can do about that, and I guess if you show off some of the cooler stuff that pd can do to some of your colleagues they might understand that even for them under certain circumstances pd is a much more appropriate tool than what they are using now.
regards,
x