hi phil, > I've given some thought to a gui preferences mechanism and discussed it > a bit with niklas on IRC. The idea is to make some gui objects that > accept messages and respond by changing visual or other preferences of > the gui. This has some advantages over a methods like a plain text file: > > - preferences can be changed at runtime by a patch. So, a particular > patch might change colors of some connections or whatnot to indicate > state. Or, the visual aspects of the interface might be changed in > response to the music as part of a combined audio and visual live > performance where the patching is visible to the audience. > > - saving the preferences is just the same as saving a patch. If the gui > loads a patch in a standard location like ~/.novarc on starup, that > patch can include some things rigged to a loadbang which set the desired > preferences (and a lot of other things, too)
a few thoughts on the ideas: - gui objects should definitely provide some message handlers, that change their appearance in the patch ... maybe in a similar way, than it is done in pd (not sure how max handles this) - however, non-gui objects (normal object boxes, connections) should follow one style, maybe the appearance can be changed from a property dialog, but it is not accessible from the dataflow language, which should basically be independent from the gui ... - i also don't really like the idea of having a nova patch, setting the preferences. i know, that some systems use this approach, but it is a bit contrary to the approach of having the nova language and the nova gui separated from each other. in terms of readability i would somehow prefer to use a configuration file (possibly xml) to store the gui preferences. - the configuration file would be read by the gui to set up the gui, but should be independent from the configuration file for the engine. so ~/.novaguirc should set up the gui preferences, while ~/.novarc is used to set up the engine and can be used by both the gui and the command-line interpreter - the resolution order of a certain gui property should be: object's guidata, gui preference, gui default i just had a brief look at your patch cords ... i really like the hover-functionality (however it should only be disabled for the edit-mode, but not for the run-mode, no?) ... having circles as xlets is quite different, than it is seen in other systems, but it is fine with me ... i am curious, what other people think about these features ... cheers, tim -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] ICQ: 96771783 http://tim.klingt.org You can play a shoestring if you're sincere John Coltrane
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