Flipp, thanks for revising my patch. The background-foreground style is nice indeed, gives better contrast. But now the surprise: on my computer (OSX) the fat point is invisible! I tried Pd 0.42 and 0.43. Apparently it is not a matter of Tk version, but what else?
Anyway, the draggable area should be comfortable so it is probably better to make a scalar with more coordinates. The circle in João's [swatch] is a good example. By the way, [swatch] & co make my Pd crash when closing the patch, don't know why, these patches are quite elaborate.
João, it is true that data structures are CPU-intensive, because they are Tk which is an interpreted language. But isn't it the same with Juce? I remember the same frustration from using MaxMsp. With the upgrade from 4.6 to 5 the graphical facilities were greatly expanded but it got no faster.
Data structures are attractive for me because of the fact that it is all vanilla Pd. I am planning to collaborate on a math&music programme for high school kids, and to make it work on arbitrary school computers, we don't want the complicated dependencies of Pd-extended. CPU performance is not so much of an issue, as the patches will be small demo's only. On the other hand, if we want real flashy GUI, we'll probably resort to OpenFrameworks and libpd (but I still have to learn that).
Katja