On Wed, Jun 09, 2004 at 12:58:21 +0200, Tim Orford wrote: > surely standalones and plugins both have their place? I dont buy > the argument that complex fx should be standalones.
Agreed. > > A further conceptual criticism is that it will just encourage people > > to produce GUIs that are inconsistent, inelegant, tasteless and hard > > yes giving people freedom will cause "inconsistent, inelegant, tasteless > and hard to use" things to arise but it will also cause good things > too:-) As long as the gui's are optional, this surely cannot be a > problem. I'm also assuming that multiple alternative gui's can be made > available. Yes (though the current hosts dont give you a way of choosing between them). 3rd party developers can easily code thier own UIs for plugins, and you can always uninstall tasteless ones with the power of rm :) > > to use -- i.e. it doesn't do anything to address the biggest problems > > a plugin author might face when writing a GUI, namely what to build > > the GUI from and how to design and organise it. A separate library > > to help with that by wrapping basic toolkit widgets in forms likely > > to be of use to audio plugins might be worth considering. > > not from my point of view. Any special library is going to be very > limiting. I would hate to see linux hobbled by this in the same way as > vst is. I dont think anyone has mentioned in this thread that > presumably libvstgui is a significant factor in encouraging the use of > those cheesy bitmaps that most of us find unusable even if we can stomach > the looks. You aren't forced to use libvstgui in VST, many people dont. I can see that a toolkit specially designed for plugins UIs would be useful, but I doubt anyone would bother to make it, an its likly to not fit enough peoples tastes in APIs get get traction. > and i dont think the plugin author should _have_ to worry about guis > at all. People who can do dsp code _and_ user interfaces are the > exception rather than the rule. > > i would rather some ladspa template gui apps were made which encouraged > artists to use whatever tech they wanted. Eg Gtk, Qt, Svg, Flash, > GnomeCanvas, SDL, XUL, DHtml, OpenGl etc... Yup. In the DSSI scheme all it needs is a tiny bit of wrapped code to bind OSC messages to GUI elements. Its dead easy in GTK*, and from what I've seen of Qt, its simple there too. * infact its automatable, I plan to write a function that will bind the Adjustment called "MYPLUGIN_GAIN" or whatever to the appropraite OSC messages when the GUI is created, which would make it possible to spit out nearly completed GUIs from glade. - Steve
