[LAU] Custom UI development in Pure Data

[Simon Wise]

On 01/09/13 03:26, Heikki Ketoharju wrote:
> Hi everyone!
>
> I don't know if this should be asked in LAD, but I'm fed up with Pure
> Data's own gui components, and would like to develop my own gui with
> something else (GTK? QT?). I don't have earlier experience with any UI
> toolkit, so I don't have any favourites. What is easiest approach to custom
> gui development with PD?
>
> I need something like list boxes and buttons with custom text. Nothing too
> special.

You have some choices:

1/ use whatever toolkit you prefer to build your GUI app, and send messages to 
PD over a socket. Pd is a language, you don't need to use the GUI parts of it at 
all ... it has very mature ways of listening to input of all sorts.

2/ ditto, but send osc or midi instead of native pd messages

3/ ditto, but use real hardware interfaces rather than the somewhat limited 
ascii - mouse - screen interface of most toolkits.

4/ use libpd to give access to lots of PD from within the GUI application you 
are building

5/ look at droid party for a project that provides another GUI method, using 
libpd internally, for making interfaces on Android (and iOS) devices.

http://droidparty.net/


All these have advantages, but of course they all involve more work than just 
using the GUI elements built into the language.

Simon