[gmpi] Re: Req 76,78

  • From: David Olofson <david@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: gmpi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Tue, 8 Feb 2005 13:35:19 +0100

On Tuesday 08 February 2005 13.02, Angus F. Hewlett wrote:
[...]
> OK.. I'm just thinking that we should be strongly discouraging
> novice developers from writing their own UI code unless they
> *absolutely* *need* *to*, there's so damn much you can break in
> subtle ways there. 

Or just make the markup option so cool looking and generally 
attractive that everyone will try it - and get hooked? ;-)

Quite seriously, actually; we're dealing with humans here, and there 
are countless examples that show that the *impression* is more 
important than the technical details.

The first thing you try is often the alternative that's easiest to get 
started with. If you can have a quick look at it and determine that 
it can indeed solve your problem, why look further? If it takes a few 
days of browsing API docs, many will just forget about it and use 
whatever tools they're already up to speed with.


> IMHO it would do a lot for overall stability if we made it
> considerably more straightforward for newbies to use markup rather
> than writing GUI code... and having them supply markup as the basis
> of the UI at API-level might encourage that.

Well... I'm not sure where it would fit in; I mean, it depends on 
where the split between the SDK and the actual GMPI API is.

Every DSP plugin will have to register one or more GUI "solutions"; 
"construct GUI from DSP interface specification" would be the most 
basic one, and "spawn this external application, handing it my 
instance ID" would be the solution for hardcore custom GUI folks. 
Somewhere in between we'd have "use this XML to construct a GUI."

Yeah, I guess at least the registration part would pretty much have to 
be on the GMPI API side - unless we do it the other way around and 
have the GUI modules register themselves as "GUI for this and that 
DSP plugin" instead, but that seems rather backwards to me.


//David Olofson - Programmer, Composer, Open Source Advocate

.- Audiality -----------------------------------------------.
|  Free/Open Source audio engine for games and multimedia.  |
| MIDI, modular synthesis, real time effects, scripting,... |
`-----------------------------------> http://audiality.org -'
   --- http://olofson.net --- http://www.reologica.se ---

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Generalized Music Plugin Interface (GMPI) public discussion list
Participation in this list is contingent upon your abiding by the
following rules:  Please stay on topic.  You are responsible for your own
words.  Please respect your fellow subscribers.  Please do not
redistribute anyone else's words without their permission.

Archive: //www.freelists.org/archives/gmpi
Email gmpi-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx w/ subject "unsubscribe" to unsubscribe

Other related posts:

  1. Home
  2. gmpi
  3. Archive
  4. 02-2005