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

[Aleksander Morgado]

Hi hi JP,

Carlos in cc (see end of email)

> 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.

Hierarchical patches and being able to save and load them is really a
must, it would be really great to make scenarios which can then be
reused as subparts of bigger scenarios, and such. Great!

> 
> 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*
> 

Wow... did I suggest that really? My suggestion was more related to the
possibility of using touch screens and multi-touch operations to manage
the objects in the scenario. Truth be told, I never thought that it
would imply not doing 3D...

> 
> - - 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.
> 

I truly don't have any idea myself :-)
Carlos, do you have any suggestion or comments on this?

Cheers!

-- 
Aleksander