Segments with humps: How to make segmented chords 100% readable
Jan 31 2008 | 8:10 am
There's always been a bit of a debate about the readability of segmented patch chords in Max, partially culminating in Puckette abandoning them entirely in Pure Data. Well, my opinion is that, when abused, can make patches into nonsense. But, without them, they can make patches aesthetically rather ugly.... Routing a wire from the bottom to the top of a patch comes to mind.
Anyways, I think Segments with humps would be cool. Here's a pic to show what I mean.
- Jan 31 2008 | 2:41 pmI used to do that manually. The hump segments were rectangular instead of semi-circles (as in your example). You can see those efforts, for example, in the patches for Classic Litter ( and scroll down).It was a real pain, and it would be nice to have an automatic crossed-patchcord detection built into some future version of Max. Semi-circular humps (or, better still, semi-sinusoidal) would be very pretty. Rounded segment corners would also be nice (but would surely annoy some people).On an historical note: I'm not sure whether Pd's failure to support segmented cords was so much an abandonment or rather simply that Miller had never implemented them in the first place. They may well have been something DDZ added to the first Opcode release of Max. I don't know what the history here is, but the second is superficially as likely an hypothesis as the first.
