

On Tue, 8 Jun 2004 21:15 , Fons Adriaensen <fons.adriaensen@skynet.be> sent:

>
>- When I saw the collection of VST plugins that Paul Davis used
>to show his VST hosting in Karlsruhe, I asked myself "My god,
>do they all look that childish ?". This is just to say I terribly
>dislike this eye-candy style, and given the choice between that
>and a (maybe boring) set of standard toolkit sliders, I'd prefer
>the latter. The ideal is somewhere in between, but certainly not
>to the eye-candy side. 
>

    Amen!


>- Before everything went digital, multitrack mixing desks had 
>lots of controls and very little space to put them in. Good 
>layout was absolutely essential, and most of the big name 
>manufacturers mastered this quite well. It's done by 
>
>   - observing elementary aesthetic rules (e.g. color 
>     combinations),

    Colors must always be configurable.  The percentage of color blind people is
much higher than most people think.


>   - removing all useless clutter,
>   - following the logic of the application, e.g. keeping
>     things that are related together,
>   - accepting culturally defined standards, such as that
>     a signal flows from left to right and from top to bottom.

    Except in China ;-)

>   - using hints that are picked up unconsciously, rather
>     than explicit labeling.
>
>All of this is practically the inverse of eye-candy.
>
>- Confucius says: When you see a piece of audio equipment
>with the word "Professional" printed on it, then it probably
>isn't.
>
>- The typical VST plugin (talking about the serious ones)
>corresponds more to a JACK application than a LADSPA plugin,
>not because both have a GUI, but because of the complexity.
>This is just a matter of naming. We could start calling a 
>JACK application a JACK 'plugin' but I'd vote against.
>JAMIN is a good example of this.
>
>- As to LADSPA plugins, we could probably give almost all
>of them a very functional and nice GUI by defining a set
>of a few dozens of 'widget types'. Then there are a few
>options:
>
>1. the plugin specifies the dimensions and positions of
>all the widgets,
>
>2. the dimensions are standard, and the plugins specifies
>the positions only,
>
>3. the host keeps it own database of layouts indexed by
>plugin ID.
>

    Good idea but I'd think that could get real complicated very fast.

Jan




