- 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.

- 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),

- 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.

- 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.