Frustrated Out of Max 7

My approach has been to stick to Max 6, partly because of design decisions in Max 7 (increasing the size of message boxes & objects is useless and illogical when hardware resolution keeps improving). These days, I use Max 7 only to check my work is fully compatible with both versions of Max, and for the occasional performance test, etc. Sure, I will fully switch to Max 7, I'm just not ready yet.

I'm having similar struggles. The new default look (brown on something just slightly less brown!) is visually unattractive to me. I find it much harder to connect outlets to inlets in Max 7 than Max 6, in fact I can barely even see the outlets and inlets a lot of the time. I do not understand why Max 7 is seen as better, at least not from a patcher editing perspective.

"I tried all the new features, with so many names I can’t even distinguish between them. Styles, attributes, snippets, templates, prototypes"

that is what thought, too, first time i saw all those.

the second thing i noticed is that when you unlock vizzie bpatchers there are only GUI objects and nothing else, and that half the preferences settings can only be accessed by successfully clicking your way thru various submenus.

I'm using max for about 10 years now, and I love it. I tried max 7, and I new I wanted it because the interface was soo much more snappy, reactive and simply seemed a lot faster. Also, I am longing for keyboard shortcuts for patching. So I see a lot of great thing about Max 7.
I am not updating since I assumed it would mean a lot of (unnecessary, stupid) work, as the OT described.. which is sad.

"...the second thing i noticed is that when you unlock vizzie bpatchers there are only GUI objects and nothing else."

Um... that's because the bpatcher contents open in Presentation mode.

They do that in order to more easily allow the use of the Vizzie modules as abstractions (whose names are mysterious things like vz.brcosr, vz.grabbr, etc.) when patching. You can double-click the abstraction to see the module's front panel, and that lets you have only the modules you care about open and visible, leaving more patcher window real estate for abstractions and regular Max objects.

It's also the reason that opening the bpatcher shows you a patcher window which is suspiciously the same size as the module itself.

There's nothing in Max 7 that isn't understandable by anyone who has worked with earlier versions. The issue is not one of deeper functionality. The issue for me, which is absolutely orthogonal to deeper functionality, is one of readability/usability (at editing time).

Max 6 had some very nice usability/editing features over Max 5 (and I still often edit with 6 and then run in 5, getting the best of both worlds) but Max 7 seems to be a step backward in this arena. It would be nice to have a "Max 6" style, particularly so that older pitchers would still look right.

The main source of frustration with Max 6 -> Max7 seems to be the loss of Max 6 patcher layout and design
when the older Max 6 patchers are opened in Max7.
Perhaps a partial solution, a reduction of the pain could be achieved if we could arrive at a scripted set of UI modifications to Max 6 patchers that would produce more compatible ui defaults for Max7....i'm thinking a series of resizing efforts and setting special "Max6import" defaults on each object, .. not impossible, but a lot of work., and would please very few in the final analysis., oh well...

"It wasn't broken, why fix it?" is what the established practictioners, in their "metalled ways" cry.

For Me, if i am in max4live, or older Max work, i stick with Max6, and when i go exploring new stuff in Max 7, i stick to max 7.

Deepest sympathy to the Max6 teachers who want to migrate.....i myself will never get over the loss of Opcode Vision.
l&k j2k aka cfb

If you don't like the way that your patching environment looks, setting up your own defaults is, I think, more straight ahead than might be implied here. I do this with some frequency - performance rig versions for daylight and nighttime, etc. - and I don't find it that difficult to do at all....

1. Take the file at the bottom here and save it as a snippet [I called mine "allUI", but your mileage may vary] - since you'll probably use it more than once.
2. Either drop the enclosed file into a new patcher window or grab the snippet you saved.
3. Click on the "paint can" (Format) icon in the upper patcher window toolbar to show the Format palette.
4. You can mouse over each icon to see what it's doing, and use the ordinary color picker to set things the way you like them

(the advantage to using the allUI snippet is that you can see how the global color attributes play out in all the UI objects at once - it's certainly way faster than making the changes object by object. I find that helpful, personally - but your mileage may vary)

5. While you're at it, set your background and locked background and font stuff to what you want, too.
6. Got things set? Choose "Create Template..." from the File menu. Name your template in the dialog box and select the checkbox for the "Default for New Patchers" option.

That's it. What you set up is now your new default template, and it's how Max7 will launch for you in the future.

I use Styles in situations where I want to create different versions of the same object (i.e. different kinds of multisliders or sliders), and tend to name them in a way that mentions the template I'm using.