Most designers -- think anyone using figma -- are effectively locked out of modern interactive and animated visuals due to not knowing hardcore shaders + effective js coding. To get a feel for how hard that is, look at the public timeline of Shirley Wu, another wonderful award-winning designer and experienced js coder, to pick this kind of stuff up. Nodes makes it a lot more accessible, similar to Max/msp for musicians. Once you look beyond the over-claiming, which is clearly nails-on-chalkboard for most engineers and scientists as you are seeing in the comments -- this is a wonderful and enabling project.
Extra impressive is they do not seem to try to 'dumb it down'. They are a consultancy and (seem to) try to use it for their own bespoke advanced installations. I don't know how well this will translate to others, but the success of Max msp and super collider make me optimistic that it can grow to those levels. Cycling 74 supports 20+ employees and empowers many musicians, and as Nodes can be used for commercial art (web+tv ads, music videos, landing pages, ...), I can see them being even bigger.
Do you have a link to this?
I was about to start prototyping some tool ideas I had in it, but I can’t find it’s source or license info anywhere. By Googling, I found the GitHub repo [0], but it’s empty of code and looks to be used for issue tracking only.
I can’t see something that’s trying to be an ecosystem being very successful without being open (see: every closed-source language/runtime ever).
I couldn’t even find any example code. I tried clicking the examples on the home page. I even tried clicking “Playground” and it wasn’t a link. The only CTA I could find was “Download Nodes”!
I googled and found this: https://nodes.io/story/#background
> When we set off to create a tool of our own, there were already plenty of different node-based or visual scripting/programming tools and environments; VVVV, Houdini, TouchDesigner, Cables.gl, Vizor Patches, Lichen, MaxMSP, UE4 Blueprints and Origami were among the most popular.
I would "kill" for a text editor/IDE/REPL shaped as a spreadsheet where each cell is a block of code with 2 possible views (text or result) linkable to other cells. This "spreadsheet" would be programming language agnostic (each cell could use a different language) and I could organize/format my cells (location, colors, size, etc) as I wish.
Do you have a draft drawing of the concept or could you otherwise elaborate a bit more?
[0] Maybe because I have a background in Architecture, I tend to look at code as I would look at a house plan.
Not language agnostic, but table based.
(eve went in to a different direction afterwards though)
- not language agnostic (JS only, AFAIK).
- lack of native desktop app to keep it fast.
- not spreadsheet view only. I would then hide/collapse syntax highlighted code inside of cells as I wish.
"Build interactive web apps"
"Create bespoke tools"
Any examples besides weird shapes?
There always seems to be a complete absence of appreciation for value to artists on HN. This is very clearly a creative tool first and foremost.
I could not look at the advanced examples on my iPad though.
Sorry about the advanced examples, some use WebGL and might have issues on iPad Safari that we'll need to check.
Thanks for the answer
Have you shared this with the Future of Coding community (https://futureofcoding.org/)? They're very excited by these kinds of tools.
Codeflow looks interesting, but is mislisted as open source in the catalog[1] although private on github, and there’s a new sign up for beta option on their page - I believe it’s no longer open source
This is like saying "What if writing was about ideas, not periods?" It already is.
*For other HN readers: If you're going to leave a message, can you ask yourself, if it's really worth to be so negative? *
It’s disheartening. I have a project I’ve just launched that I’m incredibly proud of, with all the warts a just launched thing might have, and I’ve barely mentioned it here and certainly won’t Show HN because I would be heartbroken to see it trashed by a bunch of strangers.
I encourage you to share your project. Negative comments, even if they happen, won't diminish your accomplishments.
The thing is, HN is a pretty safe place to test and get early feedback. Are the comments tell you it sucks? Hey, they cared enough to say it sucks, so incorporate their feedback and try again.
Most people who are negative here have high expectations or are clueless. Ignore if they are the latter kind!
> Largely I think that text is already a highly-structured graphical notation, and that when people try to get "away" from it they're often doing so from a position of ignorance of how very long it took to get to where we are in textual notations, and how very many technical innovations are latent in textual notations. Visually unambiguous yet uniform symbol sets, combinatorial-positional word formation, linear spatio-temporal segregation, punctuation and structured page layout .. these are all technologies in writing that we had to laboriously invent, and they have purposes, advantages! Similarly in coding, we had to invent and adapt technologies from verbal and mathematical notations refined over millennia: lines and columns, indentation, block layout, juxtaposition and precedence, scope, evaluation order, comments, grammars, version control, diff and merge algorithms ... the pile of structuring technologies embedded in the textual representation of programs isn't free, and it isn't useless. So I'm just really cautious when people suggest throwing it all out for some hypothetical reinvention. You need those structures: so you've got an immediate problem of "what are you going to use instead", and a longer-term question of "what makes you think you're not going to wind up right back at the same place ten thousand years of refining graphemes-on-a-page wound up"?
(Taken from https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org)
There's a huge headline saying "nodes for everyone". So, it's for my grandmother and my son and my uncle too?
Looking at the examples I see that there's a lot of cool looking geometry and special effects. So maybe "nodes is for everyone who wants to make cool visual things?"
Is it for artists who don't want to have do deal with code? Is it for coders who want their code to be more modular?
The best way I can understand this is maybe it's a competitor to something like Houdini, for people who are working at the intersection of art and code, it's like a procedural generation tool for art.
I thought it might be something which lets you build cool stuff without much code, but I was disappointed in the lack of modularity of some of the examples -- e.g. the "basic webGL" example in the playground. In that example almost everything interesting is going on in the one shader node.
Similarly with the boids example, the entire boid simulation is in one node with Javascript. It's not a reusable node.
I think the examples would be a lot more compelling if the nodes were each some trivial piece of functionality than anyone could look at and understand within 30 seconds, but they were put together into impressive creations. Like MIT Scratch for adults.
The problem with these examples is that there's too much complexity baked into a single node, which makes it difficult to understand those as reusable nodes. If I'm understanding it correctly, reusing nodes is the whole idea here.
What this does is lets people reason about change in massively multivariate data sets. Like GPT level multi-variate. I look forward to seeing this applied to the state of ML models, as this is what we're going to need to express the complexity of a lot of techs we will all depend on.
There is a casting pearls before swine problem they will need to overcome, as the level of management understanding to interpret and respond to the changes this framework expresses is going to take some years to get people with that level of technical sophistication into decision making positions.
Near term, my impression is it will be amazing for getting funding for scientists of all kinds, and being used in hyper-competitive data fields like americas cup sailing, F1 racing, and spooky intelligence/social media company social engineering analysis, and I could see it being used in a new hybrid of quant trading funds, as any sufficiently advanced data vis is essentially arbitrage. All very rarefied niches with a high degree of autonomy. It may be too cool for making policy or lower level decisions in the near term, but this is super epic.
When you look at the recent history of how data viz has impacted fields, it has always been way out ahead of the industries it served. I hacked around with 3D "coral" graph viz back around 99-01 (early CAIDA stuff) for internet security analysis in govt, and in spite of its incredible analytic power, the anecdata was it didn't get traction because it was unmanageably powerful. However, I think we're just entering a data viz renaissance, and this is the bar. Amazing.
How does it compare? What's new?
Certainly could say somewhere that it's one of these node-based visual programming languages made for artists. Well the node part is in the name at least :).
Is there anything like that out there? Or a good open source diagramming library that might lend itself to prototyping this?
Project is JS/TS-specific, however.
[0] https://github.com/davidkpiano/xstate
[1] https://xstate.js.org/viz/?gist=bbcb4379b36edea0458f597e5eec...
> It is not drag and drop
> I imagine it’s possible to extend it to support visual manipulation and code generation
It will be soon ;-)
[0] https://github.com/ivanreese/visual-programming-codex/blob/m...
Looking at the examples, I'm a bit overwhelmed with how much new boilerplate code I need to remember in order to use all the fancy GUI. I like the idea of having the code be front-and-center, but if you require me to remember how to use the UI elements, why not make some of that code auto-generated based on some UI widget? I like what you have, but it's so minimalist (or brutalist as someone else pointed out) that I find the actual utility of the visual controls... disappointing.
But it seems to me like the much harder part of this problem is 1) developing the nodes, and 2) ensuring that the nodes have the appropriate (sufficiently flexible/extensible) API for connections.
I guess what I'm saying is that this needs a "standard library" of nodes - at multiple layers of abstraction - if it is to gain traction. This is especially true, given that there are several other projects that are at least functionally equivalent.
The problem with visual spaghetti is the same as with monoliths, lack of understanding how to modularize the code.
I think applying digital circuit design best practices to such tools would help more people to properly modularize their boxes.
Lot of seeming derision in the comments but I LOVE Max and this is an amazing step in that direction for visuals.
How do projects like this get off the ground / get funding?
On a more substantive note, this looks really neat. However, as a data scientist of sorts I've found that what people really want is not some sort of interactive 3D visualization, but a well-computed chart showing a sort of natural experiment (e.g. the results of an A/B test) with the right axes. Has anyone used a 3D visualization outside of tech demos? I guess the NYTimes has some neat stuff that's useful.
Combined with the fonts and font sizes, it's rather hard to enjoy the site.
All of this has nothing to do with the software, which looks really interesting and may be quite successful in the future. But it's worth noting and there's nothing wrong with pointing these things out. ralusek's post should not be so grey.
