Re: [psynth-devel] On the future of the Psychosynth UI, opinions needed

[Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente]

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Shit...

http://www.reactable.com/products/mobile/

http://www.sensomusic.com/usine/

We are already late :p

JP


On 21/09/10 23:54, Juan Pedro Bolivar Puente wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> As some of you know, in a few months heavy activity in this project is
> to be expected because it is going to be the topic of my Master Thesis
> project.
> 
> The whole core of the project is going to be almost rewritten in order
> to add the following functionality:
> - A new basic sound proccessing library inspired by Boost.GIL image
> processing library.
> - Midi and sequencing support.
> - Plugin and LADSPA support.
> - Polyphony.
> - Hierarchical patches.
> - Saving/Loading patches.
> 
> This will for sure heavily influence the high level API that interfaces
> with the 3D UI so most of the UI code will be affected too. Therefore,
> the UI will be almost for sure rewritten too.
> 
> The current UI, as Alexander knows well, has several problems. The worst
> of all is called CEGUI, a bad widget library filled with bugs that
> hinders usability. Also, CEGUI releases are heterogenous and create a
> maintenance hell for packages. Also, Ogre, even though it is a great
> scenegraph library for games, it causes maintenance problems and is
> often too heavy for the lightweight usage that we are doing. Alexander
> suggested kicking 3D out of the project and, after thinking a lot about
> it and asking a lot of people, I have come up to the following decision:
> 
> *The next Psychosynth UI is not going to be 3D*
> 
> This opens a new widest range of possibilities and allows us to
> concentrate on the original goals: to provide a innovative and
> collaborative (i.e. touchable?) interface.
> 
> However, there are big constraints for the new toolkits to be used. One
> of them is time. In around 9 months or even less I will have to
> implement all the previously described changes and the new UI. That is a
> big challenge, therefore, rapid development is one of the biggest needs.
> Next, multitouch is probably the only way we can really provide a usable
> experience for Psychosynth, therefore a library that either already
> implements multitouch or is easy to adapt for so is good. While
> GNU/Linux is the main target, cross-platform support is probably the
> only way to attract the majority of musicians who use crappy operating
> systems and enlighten them with the great powers of Software Freedom :D
> 
> I, therefore, encourage anyone following the development to propose
> their ideas and thoughs on which toolkits and designs of the new
> interface. On the toolkits discussion, I make the following proposals
> for debate:
> 
> - LibNui: http://www.libnui.net/
> 
> This library looks very pretty and audio applications already use it. It
> is written in C++ and works well on IPhone, etc. Sadly, while it claims
> to work properly on GNU/Linux, even the examples included in the source
> distribution work very badly on my Debian installation. Moreover, it is
> not distributed with biggest distributions.
> 
> - Clutter: http://www.clutter-project.org/
> 
> This looks really promising. It support multi-touch already on
> GNU/Linux, but I suspect that it does not on other platforms. It is
> written in C, which is a very unproductive language, but have both C++
> and Python bindings. While C++ bindings seem to be barely maintained,
> the Python bindings are a bit better and I am strongly considering
> writing Python bindings for the 'libpsynth' and writting the whole UI in
> Python, which is a language that I really enjoy.
> 
> But it has some drawbacks. The most important is that, "MX", the only
> reasonable widget toolkit that I have found for it, does not have any
> language binding --it is in C only. Therefore we may have to write some
> widgets for it.
> 
> We can use it inside GTK, which might be a solution for some parts of
> the UI, we would like to avoid GTK as much as possible to provide a more
> interactive experience. Another solution would be to use GTK /inside/
> the Clutter scenegraph, as I have seen in some examples, but support for
> that seems experimental and not supported by the bindings.
> 
> I think that Alexander works near to people related to GTK mulitouch and
> Clutter so it would be very good if you could provide more insight on
> the suitability of this and other libraries.
> 
> 
> Thanks a lot for reading this and I look forward to hear everybody's
> comments :-)
> 
> JP
> 
> 
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