Hello,

I am know building a small GUI for a patch that I have been working on for a while (please read: the patch is now unreadable and I need a clear control on this!).

I was wondering what are your favorite means for GUI ... I now hesitate between two big trends: 1) using graph on parents 2) a new window with numbers, toggle, etc. with lot of send-symbol.

The graph on parent make me feel strange (dealing with numbers and other interface object position) ...

What are you favorite ways of doing it?

Thanks!

i think one thing you should take into account when designing a GUI is something that will fit well ontop of the work you've already done. if your patch has a message handling structure already embedded in it (one that is sufficient to control all parameters of your patch), it would be very easy to employ either of the trends mentioned above.

if your patch has a set up where many sub-patches on a main canvas, perhaps the graph-on-parent method would work well.

another consideration is displaying information from your patch (not just controlling or changing it).

though i guess the main thing is usability. certain components and controls are going to fit your patch better than others. if your patch needs to be used in some type of performance, what features will make the patch easiest to use for the performer.

i do not know much about it other than it exists, but joseph sarlo at UCSD is working on GrlPd...sometype of layer for making GUI's for your patches. the link is [url=http://crca.ucsd.edu/~jsarlo/gripd/ ]http://crca.ucsd.edu/~jsarlo/gripd/

i hope this helped some and perhaps it will stimulate some forum discussion.

Zac,

Your comment remind me that my working structure is somewhat messy and improvised along the results obtained from the patch. This suggests me to reconstruct a patch once the results are satisfying.

This lead me to an other question: I don't know if my use of graph on parent is okay, but I found that dealing with object/graph position on the parent is something frustrating in comparison with send/receiev object.

Ok, what would be your "best of" list of simple PD GUI design?

yes, dealing with the position of elements when working with graph on parent is very frustrating and somewhat mystifying. it seems there are options to change the scale between the spacing of the parent and the spacing of the child, but i have never quite gotten that to work.

i have always found that encapsulating related patch material into subpatches, and then arranging the subpatches (with graph on parent enabled) into a 'grid' of subpatches that is eas to work with is the way i like to do things. if the patch is particuarly large, i like to add color to help organize different patch features.

if you'd like to see an example of one of my more involved GUI's, you can look at http://www.geocities.com/z_fron/udm-v1.1.zip. unzip the file and and should be ready to go without any external libraries. let me know if you have any problems opening it.