On Tue, 8 Jun 2004 21:15 , Fons Adriaensen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> sent:
>
>- When I saw the collection of VST plugins that Paul Davis used
>to show his VST hosting in Karlsruhe, I asked myself "My god,
>do they all look that childish ?". This is just to say I terribly
>dislike this eye-candy style, and given the choice between that
>and a (maybe boring) set of standard toolkit sliders, I'd prefer
>the latter. The ideal is somewhere in between, but certainly not
>to the eye-candy side.
>
Amen!
>- Before everything went digital, multitrack mixing desks had
>lots of controls and very little space to put them in. Good
>layout was absolutely essential, and most of the big name
>manufacturers mastered this quite well. It's done by
>
> - observing elementary aesthetic rules (e.g. color
> combinations),
Colors must always be configurable. The percentage of color blind people is
much higher than most people think.
> - removing all useless clutter,
> - following the logic of the application, e.g. keeping
> things that are related together,
> - accepting culturally defined standards, such as that
> a signal flows from left to right and from top to bottom.
Except in China ;-)
> - using hints that are picked up unconsciously, rather
> than explicit labeling.
>
>All of this is practically the inverse of eye-candy.
>
>- Confucius says: When you see a piece of audio equipment
>with the word "Professional" printed on it, then it probably
>isn't.
>
>- The typical VST plugin (talking about the serious ones)
>corresponds more to a JACK application than a LADSPA plugin,
>not because both have a GUI, but because of the complexity.
>This is just a matter of naming. We could start calling a
>JACK application a JACK 'plugin' but I'd vote against.
>JAMIN is a good example of this.
>
>- As to LADSPA plugins, we could probably give almost all
>of them a very functional and nice GUI by defining a set
>of a few dozens of 'widget types'. Then there are a few
>options:
>
>1. the plugin specifies the dimensions and positions of
>all the widgets,
>
>2. the dimensions are standard, and the plugins specifies
>the positions only,
>
>3. the host keeps it own database of layouts indexed by
>plugin ID.
>
Good idea but I'd think that could get real complicated very fast.
Jan
