@danomatika said:
That's a result of many of the forks adopting the "kitchen sink" monolithic distribution model inherited from Pd-extended. The user gets the environment and many external libraries all together in one download, but the developers have to integrate changes from upstream themselves and build for the various platforms. It's less overheard for the user but more for the developers, which is why integrating a frankly large and complicated external like GEM is harder.
Fair enough -- but, no GEM on Mac, I can't use it in class. And I couldn't use it at home either, because (a couple of years ago) it seemed that Purr Data had added something(?) to the Pd file format so that Purr Data patches could not open reliably in Pd-vanilla. It didn't take too long to realize that I have to pick one or the other.
I'm downloading Purr Data to try again. It's been probably 2 years now.
I'm happy to download the deken GEM package.... I recognize that the whole usage of [declare] is still not as easy or straightforward for many beginners.
I teach my students not to add a bunch of paths/libs in Preferences, and always to use [declare]
Ah yes, I forgot about this one. It wasn't rejected, just came at a time when there were lots of other things shouting much louder, ie. if this isn't fixed Pd is broken on $PLATFORM. I would say that, personally, your initial posting style turned me off but I recognize where the frustration came from. I also appreciate making the point AND providing a solution, so the ball is in our court for sure. I will take a look at this soon and try it out.
Yeah... the tone. I've made more peace with the tool and hope that my tone has softened somewhat. I think at the time, I had observed that the user forum (here) tended to respond to criticism of the interface UX more or less along the lines of a/ we just get used to it (hm, no, if the tool is clumsy, we should improve the tool) or b/ we like it this way (aka don't mess with existing users' muscle memory) -- which is fine if the behavior is more or less standard, but the behavior in question is not. And in fact, the first comment on the PR was to question whether my assertions about the right behavior were correct at all.
So... while I do understand that the community would get tired of people complaining without fixing things, there is a danger in that of appearing to circle the wagons and reject criticism out of hand. (I think some comments in this thread raised that risk as well -- some members' a-priori rejection of antialiasing struck me as a quite startling form of resistance to progress.)
Perhaps the true test of a UI is not how you feel about it when you're relaxed and have all the time in the world, but rather how you feel about it when you have to get something done quickly, under time pressure. Pd works, but it doesn't always flow.
Thanks again for the detailed thoughts --
hjh