Long time, no post. What can I say, I’m a slacker.

As some of you may know, I’ve been playing around with Max/MSP of late – a sort of betrayal of my beloved PD, if you will. I promised several people I’d talk about the differences, but I don’t feel like going down the list object by object. Suffice to say, they both have some good and bad things going for them.

To start, Max/MSP 5 simply looks great. More importantly, it has the prototype feature (so you can check out differences between user interface objects without having to recreate/attach them), and the presentation mode, which when used properly results in uber-sexy looking patches. By contrast, PD looks like a whole hell of a lot of white and black. Of course, PD’s free…

The stated goal of Max’s face-lift is to make everything look better, but it does lead to a few questions – primarily, why does it still ignore some of the better features that PD has, like built-in sends/receives in sliders, bangs, and toggles? It seems to me that this severely hinders the ability of the designer to minimize patch clutter (and yes, I know about the “hide patch cords” option), and forces the designer to add another object.

But what do I know… is aesthetics more important than practicality?