Hey Marc,

I've had the exact same experience! And ironically this was at a PC exclusive school, with only a single g3, with no MAX licence. (we happen to have many final-cut edit suites but are not allowed to install MAX on them)

Almost every class was a discussion about what you can do in one and not the other. I mentioned a few things like SQL queries, ANN, built in robust tcp/ip and UDP communication, OpenGL (this was before jitter) mp3 streaming, etc etc...

no convincing, but he did attend a PD workshop I did! ;)

OSX is looking nicer and nicer, but oh dear what to do about the tcl/tk thing... (Is anyone working on a cocoa GUI for PD?), wxwindows, gtk, anything else?

*sigh*

PD is a great tool, and I agree things will only get better the more artists are using it.

Ben

----- Original Message ----- From: Marc Lavallée odradek@videotron.ca Date: Wednesday, February 12, 2003 11:32 am Subject: [PD] PD usability

I had a strange conversation yesterday with a teacher who basically said that free software sucks because of usability issues, and that he'll 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. 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.

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. How could we make PD betterso these people would agree using free software? I stopped using Max because of its restrictive license, and I prefer PD to jMax because it's lighter and faster.

Most of us don't need fancy segmented patch cords and graphical objectswith a puffy look, but can we focus a little bit on the graphicalinterface 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.

-- Marc

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