Li’l MAX clone…
If you’ve ever been interested in the MAX visual programming environment (aka “another interesting strategy for teaching programming to artist types”)…well, I just found out that the original creator, Miller Puckette, has been encouraging the development of free MAX clones for some time now, under the name PD.
At this point, PD has even evolved free equivalents for MAX’s add-on packages, MSP (for audio) and Jitter (for video)…PD’s versions are called IEM and GEM, respectively. The only problem is, all the different bits of PD are split up and scattered across the web, and some of them you have to compile yourself…which kinda defeats the purpose of teaching programming to artist types, as we don’t tend to start out with compilers.
Long story short–finally, here’s a complete Windows distribution of PD 0.36. We have Hans-Cristophe Steiner to thank for it. To me, PD feels a bit clunkier than MAX, but I haven’t got a Macintosh, nor $450 to spare, so this’ll be great to start practicing with….