thoughts about netpd gui

• increase hack- and accessibility by abstracting netpd's chat interface
• netpd-skins

with a relatively small change by moving the interface of the chat gui to an abstraction, the netpd interface would gain easy access for personal modifications. users could customize their own skins. even other techniques, like gem and datatructes, could be used. maybe some new ideas would find the way back into the standard gui.

it would be necessary to adjust the receive and send msgs of all GUI (bang, toggle, symbol, canvas) by either an $1 argument or a naming scheme (chat.send chat.send-r). a list in a wiki page could provide all aviable names.

the gui should popup on loadbang and the main patch possibly switched to hidden. this function could be part of the skin abstraction. it could also hold the code to display a certain number of past msgs. maybe other gui related code would be suitable to get included with the gui-abs.

an extended skin example could be a standart chat with more gui as 'dsp', 'gemwincontrol' 'master.volume' 'quit' 'midi activity display' 'asciiart' any possibly many more functions.

a simplified skin could be customized for children, netpd-terminals at an exhibition or inconspicuous small windows at work.