Hi all,
Purr Data 2.15.1 has been released.
We had some build issues and Albert graciously stepped up to help merge the relevant patches and posted the release on github quite quickly:
https://github.com/agraef/purr-data/releases
If you're on Gnu/Linux, do use the OBS repos that he set up. He's posted a very clear guide, and if you use it you'll get Purr updated automatically any time you update the system.
As always, report issues here:
https://git.purrdata.net/jwilkes/purr-data/-/issues
With that out of the way, I'd like to highlight the work our students did for Google Summer of Code Projects that wrapped up over a month ago.
Patch Private Abstractions
This was a feature created by Guillem Bartrina. (Actually, one of several features he added as part of his GSoC project this summer. I'll try to post about his other additions later.) It allows the user to create and use abstractions which get saved in the parent patch. Abstraction names are local to the patch which contains them, which makes for a quite workable and flexible namespacing system that's easy to use and understand.
This is a very tricky feature to design and get right, and Guillem did an excellent job considering various corner cases and optimal UX. Notice in the video that he added a few features which are useful generally for abstractions, too:
- a notification when the user has an unsaved abstraction somewhere in the running instance
- another notification when the user has two or more unsaved abstractions in the running instance. This is quite a handy feature for normal abstractions, too, as it can save you from the headache of overwriting important changes when you're working after midnight on your last cup of coffee!
There are also some helper classes that give some options to ensure that the user doesn't lose data.
Purr Data Webapp
This was another ambitious project with frontend work by Hugo Neves de Carvalho and backend, API, and merging work by Zack Lee.
This project runs the core of Purr Data and a surprisingly large number of all the externals it ships in a webpage. The front end can load, save, close, and "vis" multiple patches and run them from the same backend engine.
Thanks to the way Zack leveraged the emscripten file system, you can even save abstractions and call them from a new patch!
The patch private abstractions have already been merged into Purr Data, and we're currently working on upstreaming the webapp changes into Purr Data as well.
