As outlined in a series of posts at the Electrotap blog lately the first one dated September 27 2007 Tim Place has been creating a framework for development of MaxMSP externals using Objective-C. Having managed to do so he has decided to move straight from the C++ based 0.200 version of ttblue the library underpinning TapTools and many Jamoma externals to v.0.4 using Objective-C.
Having looked at the ttblue source code for a while planning to integrate my tl.objects externals in ttblue the code using Objective-C appeared invitingly coder-friendly. Yesterday I sat down in the evening to give it a go. In a few hours time I had ported the code for one of the Butterworth filters. With a bit of additional tweaking by Tim it is now apparently compiling and running. At the time being the Objective-C compiling is depending on the not yet released Max 5 so I can’t test for myself.
The way I see it this opens up for three very interesting potentials:
1) New externals are a lot easier to create than previous comparable to making pseudo-externals in Java to run inside the mxj/mxj~ externals.
2) HeaderDoc is used to create HTML documentation from the code aiding the documentation of the externals.
3) Most importantly the number of audio channels to be filtered can now be defined using an argument. I am dreaming that this might be the first step towards being able to introduce multicable signals in MSP.
