[Gridflow-dev] irc meeting on monday

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Sat, 30 Apr 2005, Alexandre Castonguay wrote:

> 1 - I think we need to schedule regular meetings and agree on using this 
> list as well as the irc channel to exchange info.
> 2 - How can we dovetail with the rest of the puredata documentation project?

As Krzysztof Czaja said on pd-dev mailing-list an hour ago,

« imho it is better to rethink pddp now, before adding
new contents.  The original idea was that pddp should provide
a consistent framework for at least three kinds of media:
patches, html, and ps/pdf.  The choice then was to either
base it on docbook, or to design a very simple custom format.
The latter never materialized, and certainly never will.  Hardly
being a docbook fan myself, I do not see any alternative... »

If what Krzysztof is saying is authoritative, it means either we have to:

A) wait for the PDDP to decide how to organise itself,

B) take part of the organisation of PDDP so as to accelerate the process 
of getting to a consensus on doc formatting and structure,

C) or just ignore PDDP for now.

Pick one.

> 3 - Should we develop a beginner workshop for GridFlow in partnership with
> artengine, matju and the UfO?

Did I infect you with that UfO joke? ;-) [For the rest of the readers, 
that's UofO standing for "University of Ottawa."]

> 4- I'd like us to form a list of the top 10 requests of students/artists
> wanting to work with pd/gf?

I think you'll get more than 10, or else you better fish for more than 
just 10 requests. But I agree it's good to sort them (in three ways: more 
requested, most important, and easiest to concretise).

> 1)La programmation (meme avec un environnement de programmation graphique)
> n'est pas familiere aux artistes.  Ceci peut conduire a un decouragement
> hatif.

To add to the problem, most programmers aren't familiar with the PureData 
way of programming (I mean visual dataflow programming), so for example, 
if an artist has taken a course in Java or C++ or even VisualBasic, then 
that's almost completely lost because it's almost completely unrelated, in 
terms of problem-solving techniques. PureData/Max/jMax don't have much to 
do with most other visual programming environments.

> 4)L'installation du logiciel et la configuration de l'environnement de 
> production n'est pas facile.

I don't have funding for working on making GridFlow easier to install.
PureData is better at this thing on OSX and Windows, but the Linux-based 
ones may be lagging behind.

> 5)Les participants ne font que rarement appel a l'aide qui peut etre 
> offerte par la communaute des utilisateurs.

the #dataflow chatline has gotten better in the last few months: it has 
averaged at 20 people logged in for several weeks now and has once peaked 
at 32. That's waaay different from the time when I last saw Stéphanie on 
IRC, for example.

> 6)Les concepts et la terminologie des langages de programmation sont le 
> plus souvent accessibles en anglais seulement.

About translating to French, you should contact Thomas "Outlet" Fredericks 
about it. I mean the one who presented the P5-Glove and his 
http://data-art.uqam.ca/ website, at the ninth meeting of the 
PureData-Montréal club, a month ago.

> 2)L'interface de PureData est austere et ne guide pas les utilisateurs dans
> leur apprentissage.
> I realize that the interface idea is maybe not where the most urgent needs are
> and that it requires way more resources than what I have for non-students
> (~1000$) but I think that doing a proof-of-concept interface to a pd server
> would mean continued funding ;-).

The ImpureData project is getting a grant from UQÀM (Université du Québec 
à Montréal). You could supplement that if you want (or make Artengine 
supplement it).

Also, I have two brains preparing to work on this project with me, that 
is, Carmen Rocco (from Providence, RI) and Chun Lee (from UK). Carmen has 
been working on ImpureData with me last year, and Chun Lee is making it a 
project for his masters degree and is currently learning Tcl/Tk for the 
purpose of writing user interface code for ImpureData.

> Since we have the flashserver already I suggest using flash for this.

We have discussed the Flashserver before, and I don't know how having 
students use it will help them learn how to use PureData, instead of just 
learning how to use your Flash interface. Could you please shed some light 
on this?

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