Drawing a GUI in Inkscape

So I got all excited and posted that last article about a lot of the technical stuff to make a GUI in Inkscape, but after posting it I realized it makes quite a few assumptions, so I'm going to add a few follow on posts, some of which (mostly this one) should have been written first. So its a prequel. Or a Part 0. Something like that.

Anyway the biggest assumption I made is that you are proficient in inkscape. Perhaps you are, but I wasn't until I started trying to draw GUIs in it. So basically all my skills are honed to this purpose. I'm not qualified to give a real inkscape tutorial so you should probably stop reading right now, but just in case I can help someone out there make a cool GUI I'll press onward.

Creating A GUI in Inkscape

Long time no post eh? Busy busy times. The roof of my house is naked and I'm trying to get it covered up, so not much free time. But I was trying this while waiting for a build at work. I still owe you dedicated reader(s) a discussion on some of the production techniques on my new song, but it will be a while.

Anyhow, I fiddled for a year or more with creating QT widgets that display svg drawings of primitives I draw in inkscape. I was trying to do this for rakarrack and at the time it was the best way I could reconcile my infantile GUI knowledge with my infantile art skills (inkscape is manageable for me. You just draw shapes. Its geometry!). I had moderate success, the widgets are functional, (and can be found in my infamous repository) but lacking some significant features, namely, due to QT, no floating point representation in dials. Also I have to manually create a file to dictate what primitive files are used and where they are placed in the window. The svg files are loaded at run time after this descriptor file is parsed allowing for anyone to customize the look, which is kinda cool, but not really necessary. In the end, it was over complicated, and I didn't really like working on it (why I haven't released a single program with a fancy stylized gui yet).

Enter AVTK.

How to Export a Github Wiki to PDFs and/or a Website

I recently needed to forward some documentation for work. This documentation had been done wisely in a wiki in Github. Unfortunately it was an enterprise account and we couldn't just give them a link. I just needed to put the important sections into a pdf or website and send it along.

Unfortunately I couldn't figure out how to do it.

After some pain and suffering I got it the way I wanted, and I'm sharing it here so I don't forget.

LV2 forge and Tempo syncronization, or: More LV2 Learnings (still not quite a tutorial)

Ah so the urid map must be persistent...

Top 500 Greatest Albums of All Time (with a question mark)

I've been going through and listening to the Rolling Stone Magazines list of the greatest albums. I just search the album on youtube with "full album" and nearly all of them have a hit. Its been interesting in many many ways.

The Infamous Cellular Automaton Synth

It started with the obfuscated C competition... and a youtube video. Well, no it really started with learning about Conway's Game of Life. Err.. It started with a video about a 13 year old girl who was implementing Conway's Game of Life on the raspberry pi... Ahem. I became interested in cellular automata and especially linking it to music. I originally tried to emulate this one liner that was getting passed around on IRC:

echo "main(i){for(i=0;;i++)putchar(((i*(i>>8|i>>9)&46&i>>8))^(i&i>>13|i>>6));}" | gcc -x c - && ./a.out | aplay

I tried to implement my own version that used an automaton to do the same sort of thing (I'll let you scratch your head on what it does, or just copy and paste it into your terminal). It took me a while to get it working, but I eventually got an automaton operating successfully on a torus. I then went and obfuscated it thinking of entering it into the IOCC. It looks pretty good:

echo "main(_i_,i,_,i_i){i_i=30;for(i=7;;i=_i_<<1|_i_>>7)
{_i_=0;for(_=0;_<8;_++)_i_|=((i_i&1<<((i>>_|i<<(1+~_&7))&7))>0)
<<_;putchar(_i_);}}" | gcc -x c - && ./a.out | aplay
 

Got it? Simple enough. So where did I go with this?

First Impressions with LV2 Plugin Development (almost a tutorial)

Well, its been a while hasn't it? I'm actually done with my thesis. Done. Completo. Tapos na. Weird. Luckily I still have some publications from it to submit, otherwise I wouldn't have a single thing to put off. Except...we bought a  house, and it needs a new roof, and I should be working on that...

But I'm not. In fact, I've been pretty busy with trying to spend my time on unimportant things like synthesizers. I finally started writing one. It actually started when I found out someone was making LV2 midi filters that I'd been wanting to do for quite some time (to add "humanization" in Ardour 3 etc.) I contributed a  variant that used a normal distribution rather than a uniform one (using a modified Marsaglia polar method no less). Once I'd done that lv2 plugin it just broke down the wall and I felt like I could easily do a synth.