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<H2>The User Interface</H2>
As with the parallelisation of <B>Tao</B>'s synthesis engine I did some evaluation
of the various options available both on the SGI and Linux platforms
for building a GUI for <B>Tao</B> whilst at ACAT. However at the time there were
too many other things to be done to improve the basic synthesis engine
and I never atually implemented anything concrete. Since then
the main GUI toolkits for Linux (Gtk and Qt) have become more widely
used and documented and as such are obvious choices. Of course the use
of Qt would also make it very easy to create a port for other platforms
such as MS Windows.
<P>I have had some more general thoughts on the subject of GUIs though and
having had some brief experience of 3-D animation packages such as Side Effects'
Houdini and more recently Blender I think that many of the concepts
used in their interfaces would be applicable to <B>Tao</B>. To be more specific
the ability of such packages to control and animate the values of any
parameters with the use of various spline, bezier and NURBS curves
is directly applicable. The other obvious area in which there is overlap
is that <B>Tao</B> is basically a modeling tool and many of the concepts used
in the user interfaces of animation packages such as object heirarchies;
different views, layers of objects etc. would also be applicable.
<P>Both Houdini and Blender allow the evolution of objects to be described
in a procedural manner through the use of use of scripting. Blender in
particular uses the Python OO scripting language. <B>Tao</B> could also benefit
from the dual GUI/scripting approach.
<P>To summarise, the following features would be desirable in a new
interface for <B>Tao</B>:
<P><UL><LI>a curve editor with editable curves representing arbitrary parameters;
<LI>a graphical instrument editor with a suitable toolbox;
<LI>a 3D visualisation window with rotate/zoom/translate capabilities;
<LI>some kind of data block structure showing hierarchies of components,
devices and other objects and their relationships;
<LI>some kind of integrated graphical and text based score system
where changes in the graphical representation would immediately
lead to changes in the text version and vice versa.
</UL>
<P>
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<tr><td colspan="3" class="addr"><!-- bottom panel --><ADDRESS><FONT SIZE=-1>©1999,2000 Mark Pearson
<A HREF="mailto:m.pearson@ukonline.co.uk">m.pearson@ukonline.co.uk</A> April 30, 2000</ADDRESS><BR></td></tr><!-- end bottom panel --></table></BODY></HTML>
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