Re: [LAD] Portable user interfaces for LV2 plugins

(split from: RDF libraries, was Re: [ANN] IR: LV2 Convolution Reverb) On 02/26/2011 11:35 PM, David Robillard wrote: I tend to believe that, generally, what is supposed to work in all cases doesn't work well in specific cases. It may do the job somehow, but it's not really adapted. And if this results in poor acceptance, then your investment is lost. Portability is good, but if you go too far with it, you lose a lot of API and/or platform specific features and optimizations. Also, I don't see what's so easy with browsers. I've done web development for years, and compatibility problems are the rule. I don't see why this is so crucial for plugins. It's true that browsers are evolving fast, but right now you can't even get a VU-meter to update fast enough in a portable manner. Browsers are not adapted to such things as live frequency curves and other powerful audio UIs. I don't think it's a matter of priorities here. We have different opinions on what plugin UIs could be on mobile devices. Actually, on current mobile platforms, when one wants a portable UI, there is an alternative to Web UIs: OpenGL. This runs everywhere, and as smoothly as can be. All you need is the plugin to expose draw() and mouse motion functions. Using such functions glScissor(), it would even be possible to embed a plugin UI in a host UI while making sure that it doesn't draw out of its bounds. A toolkit on top of OpenGL may often be useful especially for drawing texts and widgets. For example, there is Clutter: http://www.clutter-project.org/ But this is no constraint, every plugin would be free to use the toolkit of its choice internally when rendering within its draw() function. There are subtleties though. For example on Android, there are so-called screen densities, theoretically ranging from 120dpi to 320dpi according to the device. But that's easily solved with OpenGL, the host can scale the displayed plugins if needed. The plugins do not need to know what the ratio between a point and a pixel is. And if there existed some specialized toolkit for audio UI development, and even a UI builder in the lines of JUCE's Jucer, then creating portable and high-performance plugin UIs would become very easy. That said, I have also investigated other solutions for simple portable plugin UIs, but I think that OpenGL is worth considering. Hmm.. Does the current bridge rely on LADSPA rdf files to be present? If so then I would say that it doesn't really provide backward compatibility from LV2 to LADSPA. AFAIK, ladspa.h is the specification, and I would hope that the bridge is able to detect and load any plugin which follow this specification. In the Android case, this is entirely possible yes, during the APK packaging phase. -- Olivier