I have been eying Max/MSP for some time now. On late nights when the whiskey takes it tolls I want to be a developer myself. From my (very) basic understanding of Max it seems like they with v5 more than anything else want to make it easier to learn (which thus fits me perfectly).
From the Cycling 74 website where they’re talking about future porting to Linux and more:
Max 5 will be released in the first quarter of 2008, and will include (and require) new versions of MSP and Jitter. While MSP and Jitter will have some enhancements, the real story is the environment itself.
For current users, I would describe Max 5 as analogous to Apple’s transition from Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X. At some point, Apple decided that the technological foundation of their operating system was unsustainable, and required a completely new approach. We came to the same conclusion about many aspects of Max, and especially about the graphical interface — often the most complicated and difficult system within any large application software project.
[…]
One of my dreams is to avoid wasting an entire year’s effort the next time a hardware or software transition is forced on us. We were going to build Max on top of a platform-independent framework that will isolate us from the day-to-day nonsense Apple and Microsoft keep throwing at us. And, ultimately, we want to port Max to Linux. (No, we haven’t done this yet, but we can now conceive of doing it.).
For further comments and discussion on Max 5 I suggest you go to the post on Create Digital Music