apologies for being such an idiot and insulting your forum with my lowliness

I've been having lots of fun with puredata and want to start incorporating some images and possibly video into my stuff.

I have Pd extended - which apparently has GEM included, although I can fins no trace of it.
I've downloaded GEM for mac, but the instructions for installing it make no sense with what actually appears once it's downloaded. The instuctions:

"GEM under Mac OSX

* Download GEM for MacOSX
* Unpack"

All this is fine

"* copy folder content to your pd installation, under /gem
* copy or move Gem.PD_Darwin to PDs extra folder
* start with additional parameter -lib gem"

These are not fine for me..I don't appear to have a pd installation folder...just the app.
I also don't seem to have anything called Gem.PD_Darwin
I've tried about a million variations on the correct link in the startup menu of pd to load up GEM but it never works.
I'm a bit exasperated now...and desperate enough to show myself up as a muppet in front of you guys....pleeease can anyone help me out here?

btw I've been lurking for months and picked up many many wonderful tips and bits of advice on here, for which I thank you all.

If you have Pd-extended, Gem will be installed. It is all bundled in the .app file. In OSX, files can be "hidden" by packaging them in one .app file. If you ctrl+click on it, you will have the option of seeing the contents of the .app, where you will find Pd-extended's extras folder.

Gem, however, should be starting up with Pd-extended's default settings, meaning you don't have to do anything with the startup options. If it's not starting, chances are you don't have X11 installed. X11 is on the OSX installation disc.

By the way, there are no dumb questions when it comes to Pd. It's too big of a learning curve to not ask questions when you need to, no matter how trivial they might at first seem. And besides, Pd makes all of us feel dumb at some point anyway.

Hi Maelstorm

Thanks for that I will look into it. Yes Pd certainly cut me down to size. Funnily enough I toyed with it a few years ago and got nowhere...came back to it a few months ago and have been flying, making all sorts of weird and wonderful things. I guess something in my subconcious and been working on it a bit.

I do have X11 installed...so i'll have another bash.

Thanks for the advice...hopefully I shall be up and running now. Thanks especially for the ctrl+click tip - I'm quite new to macs too so all these little things are very handy to know!

AAAH ok, I found the folder, and Gem is indeed in there. I also found the GEM help files, but when these load up the objects such as "gemhead" are outlined in red, and warnings such as "cannot create blah blah blah" come up....

I saw there is a thread on this in the pixel# area on this forum so i'll check on there and report back before harassing you lot any further!

Thanks again for the help....as usual with Pd it's not so much that it's gone wrong, it's that I don't know PRECISELY what I should be doing

GOT GEM WORKING

you are gods!

Thanks!