From: João Pais jmmmpais@googlemail.com To: "pd-list@iem.at" pd-list@iem.at; Jonathan Wilkes jancsika@yahoo.com Sent: Tuesday, May 28, 2013 2:34 AM Subject: Re: [PD] Pd preferences dialog progress

Looks very nice. Can you show also the other sections of the dialog?

The GUI tab is just a placeholder for the moment.  I don't have anything hooked up there yet.

One minimal detail: "Use single device" instead of "devices"

Yeah, that's bad but it could still be two devices which is why I wrote it that (bad) way.  I'll try to think of an improvement.

A bigger detail: does it make sense (for logical and practical reasons) to

add a menu to select which channels go into which inputs/outpus, like on  max/msp?

Now that I've got the ttk styles down the frontend would take about 5 minutes to make.  Actually making it do something would take a lot longer, unless there's a trick to it that one of the audio gurus knows about.

I may be wrong but that feature only seems important in making insane patches sane.  If you make an audio-producing patch in a maintainable way I imagine you'd have everything ending up in a single [dac~] somewhere, especially a patch that's massive-channel. In that case you could make an abstraction [ltop~] with the same number of inlets as the [dac~],edit the [dac~] object box and make it an [ltop~], then route the logical [inlets~] inside your abstraction to the physical channels of a [dac~] inside it.  It doesn't work if there are [dac~]s sprinkled throughout a complex patch, but then that kind of patch probably doesn't work anyway. :)

But if the idea is to avoid editing the patch itself and instead edit the Pd instance, maybe someone can write a gui-plugin to automate what I wrote above. You'd right-click on a [dac~] and choose "map i/o" and it opens up a patch window with [inlet~]s corresponding to the number of of logical inputs, with a [dac~] sitting in the middle of the patch.  That's a much better user-interface than a big table.  Do the same with [outlet~]s and [adc~] and you're done.

-Jonathan

Hi List,       I've made some progress on the centralized preferences dialog  window.  Screenshot attached show the appearance under X11.

Progress:

• dropdown menus modeled after gtk for GNU/Linux (ttk::combobox)

• native dropdown menus for Windows (ttk::combobox)

• native-ish dropdown menus for OSX (ttk::menubutton)

• multi-device button doesn't disappear when clicked (see attached

audiodialog3.png)

• audio api/settings/devices all in a single window
• devices aligned in grid
• removed cruft: unnecessary colons, device checkbuttons, label

repetition

• multi-device button disabled when there aren't multiple ins/outs

• single "connect" button to clarify when Pd is supposed to open audio

• can specify "None" as

device (same as unchecking the device in the old

audio dialog)

• replaced "Apply" and "Ok" buttons with "Connect", which is more

explicit.  Also, it makes a nice flow from top to bottom: choose an api, the common audio settings, the specific devices (and device specific attributes: "channels"), and  finally click "Connect".  Connect also saves the audio settings-- I  think that's generally what the user wants to do, and there can be a more general feature to make "profiles" if the user has a more complex/dynamic setup.

I can also make it possible to specify no api (or a dummy one) if that's  desirable.

Screenshots currently lack a "Close" button which will be common to all  preference frames. (I.e., at the bottom of the dialog below the notebook

widget.)

For my own sanity the API dropdown list currently shows Pd's api number  as well as the API name.

-Jonathan