2009/6/16 Batuhan Bozkurt
<batuhan@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
If you don't need hardware accelerated fancy graphics and effects, I see no reason for staying away from SC for duing the GUI for such stuff. I mean, using java or C++ has its own merits, but only if they do good for what you actually do.
I see. I don't really need fancy graphics, but I want to give a high level of interaction. I'm not yet sure about what I'm going to do, but I need a lot of drag-and-drop functionalities, the possibility to select and group objects, drawing lines to link them and some little animation (maybe changing colour objects, or flashing ones) would be nice to have.
I'm pretty sure I can do all these things pretty easily in Processing. I'm not sure what are the limits of Supercollider in GUI programming.
This is also doable, in fact thats what I do with the Hadron Quark (check out the screencast if you haven't done it already:
http://www.batuhanbozkurt.com/projectslab/supercollider/hadron ). Saving states of your objects, instances, whatever form sclang is a lot easier. The two approaches require very different designs. In SC, you can save your stuff as strings to a text file, then load it and call .interpret on them, and they are ready. This won't be the case if you use Java, you will only be able to save client side information. Initializing everything back is a lot harder.
This seems very cool and answers to a lot of my questions. Anyway, I see that you work on a Mac, while I use Linux. What are you using for the GUI? Is it cross platform?
Regarding saving states in a text file: I talked about XML because I also wanted to try to use the XMPP protocol and I think it just works with XML file. Does supercollider support XML files?
Processing is very powerful, but for certain things. If you are really on the visual sides of things, that is something processing is powerful at. But if you don't need fancy hw accelerated graphics, it is essentially a tool, and don't do much for you by itself. So I think you shouldn't think like "processing is powerful, so it will work for me", instead you should evaluate your programming language candidates based on what you actually want to do. Staying away from sclang will cost you much, you should balance it with something else, I think.
Yes, you're right. In the end I think I have to decide (with my teacher) whether I'm going to create a prototype for a sequencer or a working supercollider application.
I see, good luck on realizing your ideas. I remember reading a quote from John Maeda: "When you use other people's software you live in somebody else's dream". We all experience it daily, looking forward to see how your dream takes shape.
:)
Nice quote. And again: thank you.