Kevin McCoy wrote: > The gui needs work - do you mean we need more/better looking gui > objects? When I was working on OS X, I couldn't really use very many > gui objects at once because of Apple's crappy closed implementation of > tcl/tk; the lag was terrible. Pd devs can't really do anything about > that (though it is a huge problem). A significant portion of pd users > are on OS X.
I have used pd on Windows, OSX, and Linux, and in all cases the tcl/tk performance was about equivalent: good enough (I certainly don't notice any lag issues with OSX), but it started to break down once there were too many objects on screen. I understand this is a problem with tcl/tk. As I understand it, tcl/tk is basically a semi-scripted programming language in itself, with a gazillion features that pd neither uses nor needs to use. It would be dead-easy to re-implement the current GUI in C or C++ using a cross-platform low-level graphics library, which would not only give us enormous visualisation capability, but I think is necessary to support any more advanced GUI development, since tcl/tk already slows down too much if there are a lot of lines or objects on-screen. This would also give us real-time data-structure visualisation as well, which would be *great*. Indeed this is a project I'd like to take on, but I can't penetrate the GUI code, can't figure out where anything hooks in to anything. Anyone care to give me some pointers? > Pd's gui definitely does need work, but without a clear roadmap it will > be hard to say what priority that is, right? Watching that google talk > has me thinking about all kinds of things. The GUI doesn't need to have a particular priority relative to any other parts, surely; GUI development and core development can occur in parallel; this would also have the nice side-effect of enforcing looser coupling between the GUI and the engine. -- damian stewart | +44 7854 493 796 | [EMAIL PROTECTED] frey | live art with machines | http://www.frey.co.nz _______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list UNSUBSCRIBE and account-management -> http://lists.puredata.info/listinfo/pd-list
