I just discovered a great set of Java tools called Nexus, which offers a wide range of audio controlers in the browser (sliders, buttons and many more). If I am not mistaken, this could be used to create a more diverse interface for PD patches, which could be run on a separate touchscreen device. I'm interested in this because it would be more customiseable than using midi hardware, and of course much cheaper (if you already have a touchscreen device, that is). You can find out more about Nexus here.

The catch is that you need to know something about web development to be able to use it, and I don't. I'm posting here to see if anyone else has done the necessary legwork to get it running on PD before. Maybe you could share your expertise? If it's new to everyone, then maybe we can work it out together, as I'm sure that this tool would be of interest to many people in the PD community.

Not sure if "technical issues" is the right forum for this post--please feel free to move it.

My current live performance setup is using Nexus UI as the entire front end. I run it on a nice little tablet pc so i just put a script to fire off a kiosk'd browser with my control surface (lots of faders and xy pads) and my pd patch underneath and let it get to work. it works swimmingly for doing touch control on a local machine.

@StrangerDayze Sounds fantastic! Can you give us any help with how to set it up? I understand that you need to host it on a web server (which I don't know how to do at all!) Do you have to be connected to the internet to use it, or can you do it over a regular wi-fi / bluetooth connection?

Hello Liam,
Just to get you moving... the javascript that you downloaded needs to be run in a web page. You don't need a server.
Here is the page that I made just to look at the "multislider"..nexus.html
If you open it in your browser you will probably get a warning about running scripts, so click ok and you will see the multislider or nothing probably because it cannot find your nexus script. Right-click the page to view the source code. There you can change the path to the nexus script and then start to write in the code required to get the multislider to the right size/ talk osc to the right address/etc.
David.

hi, there are some projects about this stuff,
nice GUI elements with javascript, node.js, websockets and OSC involved.
But haven't got the time to learn all this.
Maybe this post will kick me ....
http://kievii.net/examples.html
https://github.com/hanshuebner/live-web-components
https://github.com/triss/duplex-nexus-osc
https://github.com/vnoise/vtouch

@whale-av Thanks David, I can see now how to go about designing this. Now all I need to do is work out how to use AJAX to send the data to PD. I'll return here when I need more help.

For anyone is just browsing this thread, I highly recommend checking out joints and multitouch. These could be game changers for PD.

my understanding was you needed an apache server if you were hosting it locally (say like using a microsoft surface or some other sort of machine... so for me i'm just running xampp and put all my interfaces in the live webpages folder (htcdocs or some such folder) similarly for my ubuntu machine (but different directory structure obviously) then i just used a simple html editor and made a web page that'd have all my elements... I could have gone too far and reinvented the wheel given whale-av's statement on not needing a server because I wasn't getting OSC to-from browser->pd without it and just assumed a localhost was needed..
http://imgur.com/kUBcsi6 my interface is 4 faders a slew of xy controllers 2 button per channel and some toggles in there for good measure the back is this messy patch https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B41sSIxSufHwM1hRYXNRYVFxb2xpZE9tNDN1NnRXYmNFQlJN/view?usp=sharing