Candy For Eyeballs...

Adam and I have been having an ongoing… well, “argument” is too strong a word. “Discussion” would be better, although it does get heated at times. The subject is eye candy in plug-ins, specifically things that are there just to make something look cool, but serve no purpose whatsoever with respect to the operation of the plug-in.

Being me, you can guess what side of the argument I’m on. As long as there isn’t an unnecessary use of CPU cycles, I’m all for it. The current windmill I’m tilting away at is a real-time animated waveform display for Discord 3. As you all know, Discord is a pitch-shifter, so there’s no earthly reason to have a waveform display in the UI. It would impart no information whatsoever that has anything to do with the plug-in.

Now, that fact in and of itself doesn’t bother me, as I’ve frequently been known to make UI design decisions based upon aesthetics alone. (The 3/4 view of the original Dubstation would be a good example of such.) I’m of the considered opinion that if something looks interesting, it has a direct effect on the creativity pathways of the brain, and thus is a Good Thing.

Adam, being Adam, disagrees. Normally, I can just do what I want and he’ll eventually come around, but this is an interesting case. Making an animated waveform display is a fairly complex process, and we’d have to devote a week or more of dev time to adding it. The main thing to consider is that once we’ve hacked the underlying framework in to shape, we’ll have the waveform display for other plug-ins that might actually make use of such a thing, so it’s not wasted development time really. It’s just wasted on this particular plug-in that has no need for such a thing.

So, I put it to you, dear friends. Is a quixotic pursuit like this worth the dev time, overall? Do you find that you’re more likely to go to a plug-in that has bells and whistles in the UI? Or do you just want the fucking thing to do its job and not do the Macarana every time you open its editor?