Initially I didn’t care about the rounded corners debate when Max5 came out, but now I’m working on some upgrades to someone else’s patch and his preset interface doesn’t look great with the rounded message boxes. Also, I figured coding some GUI object would clean up the code quite a bit.

At first I thought about trying a JSUI (something I have no experience with), but the drawing dimensions relative to size seemed like it would create a big hassle making things work correctly with font sizes. Also I ran into this thread:

http://www.cycling74.com/forums/index.php?t=msg&goto=46889&rid=4220&S=c988e8cbb36f1c2e01495fd542ed248b&srch=jsui+font#msg_46889

which made me nervous about wasted CPU cycles (more important than making it prettier or making the code cleaner).

I then thought about redoing this interface in Swing. The separate window thing is not an issue as the subpatch I’m thinking of converting ran in a separate window. My concern here again is CPU. Is creating a swing interface that is essentially 45 Max4.6 style message boxes and the backend to adjust colors and text going to be a significant CPU hit compared to doing it with message boxes in Max? If you need an example to give a better answer, I’ll try to get one up between some other projects I need to get done tonight.

Any other caveats I should keep in mind about using Swing with Max5?

Thanks!