[LAD] "bleeding edge html5" has interesting Audio APIs

[James Morris]

On Mon, 21 Nov 2011 18:33:38 -0500
David Robillard <d at drobilla.net> wrote:

> On Mon, 2011-11-21 at 22:57 +0000, Fons Adriaensen wrote:
> > On Mon, Nov 21, 2011 at 11:42:31PM +0100, Nick Copeland wrote:
> > > 
> > > > Subject: Re: [LAD] "bleeding edge html5" has interesting Audio
> > > > APIs From: d at drobilla.net
> > > >
> > > >  All we need is a couple of sliders and knobs and such.  It's
> > > > quite straight forward
> > > 
> > > Ah, is that all we need? I never realised it was so simple. Can I
> > > have them in some dull, boring grey colour with sad square boxes?
> > > You know, something that really inspires and that will convince
> > > every iPad user that their ubercool GUI are a total waste of
> > > time. Can you do that for me? That would be a killer!
> > 
> > Even almost every GUI toolkit sliders fails when used for
> > anything serious in audio. Try tuning your oscillators in
> > e.g. AMS when the auto-resizing frequency slider happens to 
> > have 27.142857 steps per octave. 
> 
> For stuff like this you need a way to enter precise values with a
> corresponding text box anyway.
> 
> Though the old fan slider idea was a pretty good one...

Earlier this year I tried updating the PHAT toolkit to use the Cairo
backend for rendering (because the drawing code used by PHAT to
render the fans is deprecated).

The problem I found was that in order to get Cairo to draw the phans
on the desktop (without obliterating the desktop) desktop compositing
was required. I went round in circles looking at the documentation
trying to find a way to get it working without compositing enabled
(and without using deprecated code) but by the time I got to looking in
the GTK source itself I decided to make the fans optional while
additionally allowing shift to be used in combination without dragging
the slider for greater precision (and ctrl for even more).

I called it 'phin' and it can be found in the petri-foo source if you
want to look.


James.