[LAD] audio/midi app development

[Paul Davis]

On Tue, Jun 15, 2010 at 11:27 AM, James Morris <james at jwm-art.net> wrote:

> Incidentally, if I want the GUI to update very close to real time, say
> a grid of blocks flashing on and off as notes come and go, any
> thoughts? Would a GTK GUI update fast enough?

key insight: your display monitor only redraws between 60 and 90 times
per second. attempting to redraw anything more frequently than this is
simply wasting CPU cycles and making your life more difficult. put
more bluntly: it doesn't matter if you have notes turning on and off
1000 times per second - you and your users not working on a display
device that can possibly show this. you need to mentally disconnect
what is going on in the backend from what is going on in the GUI : the
backend can tell some layer of code in the GUI what is happening, but
defer updates to a reasonable refresh rate.

>I'm also wondering about
> going for an "Immediate Mode" GUI using SDL, possibly with OpenGL, I'm
> unsure... It's a way off yet, I'm concentrating on getting the engine
> working without a UI first.

Gtk or Qt or whatever will work just as well in terms of screen
refresh/update as any other solution. That doesn't mean that there
might not be other reasons to prefer a solution.

--p