[linux-audio-user] i'm a graphic designer - use me! ;-)

[Mike Rawes]

 --- iriXx <m at irixx.org> wrote: > actually i've worked with those sorts of
apps, like Reason, in windows 
> *cough splutter*... and i find them really annoying to work with... 
> knobs dont actually translate very well into mouse usage!!! you end up 
> struggling to control the thing... although generally it runs on the y 
> axis up and down.... which is kinda counter-intuitive to using a knob in 
> 3 dimensions!

Quite. Such a knob is really a slider, behaviourwise. It just takes up less
room on screen. The knobs in SpiralSynthModular are better (in some ways) as
you turn them by rotating the mouse, which is tricky, but has the nice side
effect of allowing finer adjustments at larger distances from the centre.

> there seems to be a fashion for this sort of stuff now... i dont find it 
> very helpful as i'm from the bizarre generation that has done all their 
> work inside of a computer... earlier on in my studies i did do the 
> basics of analog synthesis with oscillators etc, but i find myself lost 
> when i go into a studio full of hardware - this is also mainly because 
> im dyspraxic - so i dont find connecting a load of wires to each other a 
> very helpful way of setting up... using a few commands is much easier 
> for me!

Amen etc :) I think a wire display is useful for seeing how things hang
together, but as an interface paradigm, it tends to suck somewhat. It seems to
be the de-facto method of doing things though. 

Incidentally, I've been planning to make a command-line/script driven LADSPA
modular synth for some time, but due to lazyness, I've nothing to show yet...

What I'd like is this:

$ add plugin foo
$ add plugin bar
$ set portrange bar.inport -2.0 +2.0
$ connect plugin foo.outport bar.inport
$ :
$ run

with tab completion. Does anyone know if such a thing exists? It would
basically be like ecasound(-iam?), but with direct wiring capabilities for all
plugin ports.

> i am a graphic designer by trade though and would be very happy to offer 
> my 'services' to anyone who is interested in gui design - not being a 
> programmer i've been frustrated at my inability to contribute back to 
> the free software community. but i also notice so often that windows and 
> mac in particular have the edge with the nice gui apps at the moment... 
> its sad to say but all these nice guis are what are attracting people to 
> those platforms... and it *does* make them a lot easier to use. i figure 
> this is because most of the gnu/linux community are programmers first 
> and foremost... so we've got lots of great apps... but i find the look 
> and feel of the bare toolkits frustrating at times...
> 
> so please... if you want a nice graphic design, i'd be more than happy 
> to help!  :-)

Maybe some sort of repository for nice widget graphics? I'm not sure how we'd
do this - anyone for an Open Graphics Library?

I might try my hand at drawing some widgets and put them on the web
somewhere...

Mike

p.s. Nice website :)


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