Why are all plugins square or rectangle?

[Touch The Universe]

Really dumb question but why don't I see circle vsti's or triangle ones? or vst's with odd shapes that have no gui in the middle and see through. Even though it'd be ridiculous, it'd be different and isn't that a good thing to make others notice in synth land?

[DrGonzo]

Good question. The plugins for the old Creamware cards used odd shapes for their plugins. But that was a long time ago.

/C

[sprnva]

I guess because they have to be windowed.

[thecontrolcentre]

Squares and rectangles fit together better on a rectangular screen.

[stratum]

A nonrectangular window is actually a rectangular window with transparent regions. From a programmer's perspective it looks like an unnecessary feature that you would need to spend time to implement, and in the end it doesn't seem to be very useful for anything.

[JCJR]

Just guessing but any oddity in a plugin window handling seems begging for it to completely freak out assorted hosts, each host possibly feeaking in a unique peculiar fashion.

Also from the "once burned" perspective, it has been possible to make weird shaped windows for decades but the techniques keep changing, so after the cutsie novelty window gets killed by a new update of winders or macos a time or two, an older developer might decide that it is wasted time trying to keep rewriting non-essential feature and just use whatever looks like it might run the max number of years before some new hire at Apple or MS decides to break the ancient way that had been written by new retirees, just because it is old fashioned or difficult to continue maintaining along with the next big thing.

Shortly after the invention of fire I used custom written windows I liked better on Mac using a technology called wdefs, but by the time Apple got around to breaking wdefs, they had broken so much "more important stuff" that giving up customized window behavior (or rewriting it for the next big thing) was the least of my concerns. If your pants are on fire then that burning shed can wait!

[vurt]

just get some fish eye lens glasses

[deastman]

The window doesn’t even exist, man... it’s all in your mind!

[mystran]

Host gives a rectangle for the plugin to place itself into, so even if the plugin itself was in the shape of a knot it'd still effectively occupy a rectangle region on the screen.

[vurt]

its actually because hardware manufacturers have no imagination.
so all the controllers are rectangular.
thus, to make it easier for the musicians mind (they are a bit daft) to marry the controller to the vst in question, so as to make using the said vst, "simple enough even a drummer could operate it" vst devs, decided it would be best to follow suit.

if only the bop pad had sold more

[vurt]

and of course, no triangles, because, the illuminati.

[JCJR]

Well pre-osx Mac quickdraw regions were defined maybe over-engineered but a window region (or any quickdraw region) well it could be derived from a rectangle or arbitrary bitmap but so far as I recall was similar to a vector draw list.

So that defining a funky window shape there would be the actual shape recognized by the OS window z-order mechanisms, not just a shape embedded in a rectangle bounding frame.

Admittedly probably unnecessarily elaborate though it could do some fancy tricks. Dunno if other major OS's had such fancy native region functionality. Am way out of date on the topic.

But after all a windowed scrolling mobius strip window would be so yesterday, though horz scrolling a looped wave editor window from side A thru strip side B and finally back to the origin again on side A might be cute.

Ahh, but an x-y scrolled Klein bottle window where you navigate both the outside and inside. The Klein bottle 3d tilts and zooms onscreen as you scroll the window to view all it's surfaces. Silly idea.

[vurt]

you had me at klein bottle

[Karbon L. Forms]

I remember waaaaaaaaaaaaay back when juce first came out for plugins. with a line of code you could make any component "draggable-onto-desktop", and they all came with transparency so you could drag a group of buttons/sliders whatever out to where you needed them on top of your daw and still see behind them. winston loved it(where he go?), was moving about tracktion taking just the buttons he needed and putting main plug window out of way behind daw.

[Touch The Universe]

Thanks guys. guess I have an answer/s that makes sense. Seems it's all the DAWS fault whom might be operating under the constraints of the OS.

Next time I run into bill or tim, I'll demand circle vsti's