Hi everyone,

recently there have been a few really great patches posted here that use data structures for making gui objects (menus, sliders, xy pads etc). I've been using pd for a few years but I've always ignored data structures, it seemed too difficult a concept to get my head around and I never really thought I needed to learn that side of patching anyway, but now I'd like to start learning how to make (and adapt) some gui objects like slider banks, drawable envelopes and so on.

Does anyone have any suggestions at all on how to get started? Some tutorials that there might be which are useful for learning this kind of stuff? (videos would be even better).
I've looked at some existing data structure-based objects posted here but they make no sense to me at all, and the tutorials in the help browser are also a bit hard to understand (maybe because I have zero programming experience except pd), although I haven't looked at them in depth yet.

Thanks very much for your help.

@ingox that was a nice finding "Then we learned that it is possible to simply store them in lists." would be nice to know more about the concept of pure data data structures

here are 2 other data structure tutorials: https://github.com/megalon/pd-gui-examples (the bottom part is about ds)
https://github.com/megalon/pd-image-to-structs

@Jona Thanks for sharing those!

I made this patch to help with the color scheme for the data structure objects, very simple but a time saver.
struct.rgb.pd

@weightless thats something we implemented at the right bottom of the lissa-seq interface too: https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/10876/lissajous-midi-sequencer/4

@Jona Ah I completely missed it! I thought this was helpful to pop into a work-in-progress patch when trying to come up with nice colors.

That sequencer is excellent by the way, I must look at it again since when you posted it I knew nothing about data structures.

@weightless of course a nice way to test or change different colors

And, if you want to store a list ? if you define a list in the data stucture, it seems like it's ok but then, no way to set it or get it.

@Il-pleut here is an example:
https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/12059/array-text-pointer
here is another (experimental) use case:
https://forum.pdpatchrepo.info/topic/8836/dictionary-object-in-pd-extended/26

@Jona Thank you.