Rebol/View cousins => KeyKit + PureData: Interesting toolkits and grap

INTRO Diving into Rebol/View examples reminds me of KeyKit and PD PureData[+GEM]. These are two very cool free toolkits developed for programmer/musicians wanting to do develop interactive virtual instruments for broad MIDI handling, algorithmic processing and custom virtual instruments. For those of you interested in Languages and frameworks, especially ones oriented towards dynamic scriptable interfaces, I recommend to explorer these. Hard to describe.. your really have to experience them to appreciate. But in a nutshell ... Fun, smart, and full of good ideas. KEYKIT KeyKit is a wonderful object-oriented Midi processing toolkit developed by Tim Thompson. It is free and runs fairly cross-platform. KeyKit does one thing brilliantly: process MIDI [Musical Instrument Digital Interface], but to accomplish this, its author went much further and created a powerful object-oriented language, similar to Python. Like Rebol/View the entire graphical user interface in KeyKit is also written in KeyKit. Almost everything is [platform-independent] readable ASCII .k files. The GUI has some very interesting ideas for reducing window clutter by encouraging PAGES [multiple screens a little reminiscent of Amiga's screen idea]. The interface is minimal black and white, but that does not stop it being incredibly powerful adn useful. Another original idea is a kind of pop-up palette device for selecting tools/actions. A right click pops up a tool menu palette. This also has sub-menus, and at any time one can 'tear off' and item placing it on the page for direct access. Selecting a function from the menu, say COPY, MOVE, DELETE, RESIZE etc. puts the system into that mode, waiting for one to pick an object to apply the function to. This is very similar to the famous interface Form.Z use for its approaches architectural 3D solid modeling. Syntactically, this is identical to the way much of Rebol behaves too - an action is indicated it waits for some target next on the stack, kind of smart forward-polish Forth. Free download: http://nosuch.com/keykit/ PD: PUREDATA PD, short for Pure Data, is a graphical programming language for audio and multimedia, written by Miller Puckette. http://crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/software.html GEM (Graphics Environment for Multimedia) by Mark Danks, is a library that is loaded into PD to add real-time OpenGL rendering and pixel graphics, using the same graphical programming paradigm. http://www.danks.org/mark/GEM/ There used to be a strange and wonderful creature called HSML [Hierarchical Music Specification Language]. It was written in powerful modern Forth and ran on Amigas [JFORTH] and Macintoshes. Programming HMSL was all ASCII text files, though it included an great library of examples by its tireless developer, Phil Burke and colleagues. http://www.softsynth.com/hmsl/hmsl_details.html http://www.softsynth.com/jforth/ Then came MAX, a fabulous visual programming and script toolkit for experimental virtual MIDI instruments and more. Developed at IRCAM in Paris, MAX was available for SGI and Macintosh. http://www.musicmachinestudio.com/max_links.html Now comes PD or PureData, a sort of liberated son of MAX, niece of HSML. PD is an opensource development by Miller Puckette one of the original authors of Max, and now at the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts, San Diego http://crca.ucsd.edu/ PD is a visual programming tool which has clever interfaces combining interactive widgets with written syntax. Everything is a word with inputs and outputs, which for real-time media signal processing makes it akin to Rebol. In PD these words are visible graphics elements where one makes literal connections to oth her words. Given the paradigm I am wondering how to implement such a design in Rebol/View and how exploring PD adn KeyKit might influence Rebol/View positively in the future GEM: http://www.danks.org/mark/GEM/ FAQ: http://www.pure-data.org/ DOCS: http://www.pure-data.org/doc/ http://www.crca.ucsd.edu/~msp/Pd_documentation/index.htm - Jason