conceptual inertia

Purchased a copy of Max/MSP today over at Cycling ’74. I decided to go with version 5′s new hotness over Pd. User interface does matter. Documentation, tutorials, and a slick integrated help system are even more important.

After installation, it took under 5 minutes before I was creating and experimenting with my first patch. Here’s how it went down.

The first thing I did was open the help file.

And prominently displayed in the upper right corner is a listing of tutorials…

The documentation is also available online, so you can view the above page here.

I think Max/MSP – when loaded the first time – should display the help documentation or better yet, a window to play the Tutorial Zero Video. Instead, they simply show the Max window, which could be a little disconcerting for first time users.

The Tutorial Zero Video is short and sweet. I only watched a portion of it before I was playing around with the button and metronome objects. Behold! The “Hello Metro” patch in all it’s glory!

I love it; because I have an appreciation for the amount of work it would take to code something similar.

Now, depending on your preference, you may want to toggle on ‘Segmented Patch Cords’ from the Options menu.

Which means the difference between these two layouts. The second one (with segmented patch cords) looks more organized but can be time consuming.

Or you could do this, to give it that printed circuit board look…

Or this awesomeness…

The Zoom tool is a little awkward at first.

I guess I was hoping for a Zoom tool similar to the one found in Adobe products – where you also hold down the space bar to pan around.

Enabling grid snapping at the bottom of the window is handy.

As are Align commands in the Arrange menu.

Ok, enough of that, back to the patch. When hovering over an inlet/outlet, a tooltip appears. This is the first stage of help integration.

Even better is Alt or Option clicking an object (ie. the metro object). This launches a window that displays a .maxhelp file for the object – the second stage of help integration. What’s really cool about this window is that it contains working patches that you can play with.

It’s too bad you can’t Option click the patcher items even further…wait a minute. Maybe you can’t Option click items because the patch is running. I wonder what happens when you drop into Edit mode…

Aha! I discovered your magic, it’s just another patcher window. (Yeah, I’m a little slow sometimes.) Well, I’m gonna lock that sucker back up because I don’t want to mess around editing the help files.

At the top right is a link to open a detailed reference manual – the third stage of help integration. You can view the reference for the metro object here. Awesome.

So, now I want to hook up a horizontal slider object to my metro object. Add a slider…

Hmm…the slider is vertical by default. That number above the icon sure looks interesting. I wonder what would happen if I clicked it…

Shaweet. Now I’ll quickly add a number box to view the output of the slider. The new patch looks like this…

It appears the default range of the slider is 0-127, which is quite handy for MIDI.

Well, that’s all for now. Until next time!