On Jan 13, 2012, at 12:59 AM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: Hans-Christoph Steiner hans@at.or.at To: Jonathan Wilkes jancsika@yahoo.com Cc: Max abonnements@revolwear.com; pd list pd-list@iem.at; Ben Baker-Smith bbakersmith@gmail.com Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2012 11:20 PM Subject: Re: Tooltips in Pd-extended 0.43 WAS: no pd?? WTF ????
On Jan 12, 2012, at 10:08 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: Hans-Christoph Steiner hans@at.or.at To: Jonathan Wilkes jancsika@yahoo.com Cc: Max abonnements@revolwear.com; pd list
pd-list@iem.at; Ben Baker-Smith bbakersmith@gmail.com
Sent: Thursday, January 12, 2012 8:50 PM Subject: Tooltips in Pd-extended 0.43 WAS: no pd?? WTF ????
On Jan 12, 2012, at 6:56 PM, Jonathan Wilkes wrote:
----- Original Message -----
From: Max abonnements@revolwear.com To: Jonathan Wilkes jancsika@yahoo.com Cc: Richie Cyngler glitchpop@gmail.com; pd list
pd-list@iem.at; Ben Baker-Smith bbakersmith@gmail.com
Sent: Wednesday, January 11, 2012 7:09 AM Subject: Re: [PD] no pd?? WTF ????
And that's not the end of the vicious cycle. Students who saved their money to buy a Max license are often
unwilling
to
accept that their work could have been done as easy in Pd, and
sometimes even
better and/or easier.
If you think of free software as an ethical issue like I do and are talking about free
programs
that have a
proprietary alternative, there is still an important division
between those
programs that are
free and superior to their proprietary counterparts on practical
grounds,
and those that
don't have the same feature set as their proprietary
counterparts (but
are still quite good).
In terms of ease of patching, Pd is clearly in the latter camp--
Max has
infinite undo, a
"Tidy Up" that actually _does_ something useful, and a
set of
externals that allows to make
multiple connections at once and lots of other shortcuts (maybe
these are
part of the core now,
I'm not sure). Plus tooltips, anchors to resize
guis/boxes/messages,
and probably lots of
other things that make patching easier.
I use Pd and free software (almost) exclusively, but we should be
clear
about which features
are available and which are not.
Excellent point.
Speaking of, is your tooltips patch fully functional in Pd-extended
0.43? I
believe it is included, right? It would be great to ship with that
working.
There was the problem that if you did [loadbang]-[tip 1 blah blah blah(-[s
pd-this-canvas.pd]
the label doesn't get the right width. I tried using the
<<Loaded>> virtual event and it didn't
work, and then I think you said that the patch should be finished drawing
before <<Loaded>>
happens.
I could just use after idle or update idletasks but those are heavily
critiqued on the tcl wiki...
'update' is bad news, but 'after idle' is fine. It just might lead to tricky bugs since things will not necessarily execute in the order you might think.
The "tricky bugs" warning was what made me not want to use 'after idle'. I think in another thread you agreed that <<Loaded>> should get triggered after the patch is drawn, so a quick and dirty solution would put 'after idle' right before the <<Loaded>> virtual event in the relevant proc (with a comment that this isn't the best solution). If that sounds like a bad idea, then the tooltips patch shouldn't be included until <<Loaded>> works correctly.
Unless there's another solution I'm not thinking of...
Fixing <<Loaded>> is probably a bigger thing than I can manage for the Pd-extended 0.43 release, but patches are welcome. So the question of the moment is: are the tooltips usable enough to leave them in? Do they cause any problems?
.hc
"Free software means you control what your computer does. Non-free software means someone else controls that, and to some extent controls you." - Richard M. Stallman