I recently attended a swank session of the Bay Area Computer Music Technology Meetup group. A crowd of ~40 rolled into Pyramind in San Francisco for software presentations and performances of interest to musical hackers, interactive technology nerds and all varieties of electronic freaks.

In the first of these, Cycling '74's Andrew Benson gave a look inside the almost-released Max 5 to a very appreciative audience of patchers. Here's a small, quick list I gathered of some Max 5 grooviness coming soon from the Cycling elves:

- Goodbye [prepend set]! Message boxes have a right inlet specifically for this function.

- Lots of Maxers love the enhancements provided to 4.6.x by Nathanaël Lécaudé's Max Toolbox. Max 5 has new and requested shortcuts and key combos built right in.

- Taking a cue from Ableton's Info View in Live, there's a new Clue window which displays information on mouse-over. An annotation attribute allows you to add your own custom clues.

- The new UI is gorgeous, vector-driven goodness, courtesy of Raw Material Software's Juce. Resolution independent resize is sweet.

- Multiple live views on the same patch, at different magnification levels. As someone who often builds patches which spill beyond the bounds of a screen, this is fantastic. Changes update in all views simultaneously.

- Object name auto-completion. To quote Andrew, "Several of our developers bought iPhones during development and fell in love with auto-completion." It shows. Arrow through the drop-down list of auto-complete object choices and the Clue window shows information and arguments for each. Pow! Instant answers to "What does [somefunkyobject] do again?"

- Color schemes. The entire application is default color customizable. Sets of colors can be saved and recalled instantly, for say, "dimly lit performance" view or patching in the "well lit lab" view. Different background colors for locked and unlocked patchers.

- Mouse over the left edge of an object with an inspector and a small spot to click appears. Click and, viola! the inspector opens. Inspectors used to be Max patches themselves, but the new method has inspectors created on-the-fly if I understand Andrew correctly.

- Drag and drop audio files directly into [buffer~]. *throws double devil sign*

- I know most Max users are already aware of the new Presentation Mode, but to see it in action is to love it.

- New debug tools = excellent. Watchpoints will seriously change the way I track down problems. You drop Watchpoints on patch cords and they auto-number. Open the Watchpoints window and you'll find a numbered list display of all your Watchpoints with their data changing realtime as it zips through the cables. There's a floating audio meter for hovering over signal patch cords, too.

Andrew also mentioned most third party external packages have been tested and are working well. So the various quick-patching favorites like Peter Elsea's LObjects, Emmanuel Jordan's Ejies and Peter Castine's Litter Power suite should be there from go. I generally only use third-party objects for proof of concept or if there's something I absolutely want potentially greater efficiency in, but it's nice to know they'll be available from the start. The only third party externals which will likely need complete rewrites are those with graphic interfaces.

Cycling have paid great attention to usability in Max 5, with the majority of changes aimed at improving user experience and providing a consistent and modern framework for programming in Max. It's not really an upgrade in the sense of providing new toys for making noise... it seems more the foundation for future development, a new beginning taking the best of the past 20 years and making it space-worthy for a new era of exploration. I'm excited, and very impressed by the way they've balanced familiarity with improvements to workflow and environment. Presentation Mode alone is a workflow gift from the gods. Add in a common interface across platforms and the possibility of an eventual Linux port and you realize this is the real deal.

Lastly, Max 5 will live on the same partition as Max 4.6.x. Excellent news... now I won't need to buy a new machine while I'm waiting for the next Pluggo build based on Max 5. I seriously cannot wait to take advantage of the new interface capabilities for a new wave of Daevl.Plugs.