I'm fine with brutalist web design, what I can't stand is low font-weights and small font sizes, like assuming all of your readers are on a 4K screen with the eyes of a 20 year old.
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.
I personally like seeing it because it’s still not as pervasive as a lot of design trends and feels like there’s still some variety on the web. But I pain for anyone struggling with the accessibility of these designs.
I have not thought about the irony of “HTML blue” before, but I am not a fan of its use, nor that inner-nostril shade of pink (please don’t insult salmon by calling the color that). I love Space Mono/Grotesk and I don't understand why they chose Space Mono as the body type, when it has a lower x-height and lower weight. They were already using Space Grotesk to begin with for headings and else where (albeit sparingly/unpredictably)...strange.
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.
Not with web tech. I could argue there are numerous systems available to program vsts and other audio plugins visually, but maxMSP still adds something unique and useful.
I think it has other uses, being able to attach visualizations to data processing code is very helpful especially if it's simple to just drop in something like a histogram. It would be even nicer to have a way to scrub through the processed items and see them displayed in an easy to read format on the screen as you do so. Cypress allows this to a degree by recording the visual state of a page as tests are run and lets you hover over the output and see the layout change as you scroll up and down.
40-second video that lagged so much it was unplayable on my X200 that runs discord fine, and can have 300 tabs open in firefox without a sweat. Obviously, we're off to a good start.
Forever benchmarking on old hardware is counterintuitive to forward progress.
As much as I love my T400, I know someday, probably sooner rather than later, it won’t be suited to daily use.
I wasn't, the point I was making is if their website lags like hell -- for a tiny video, what does that say about their software's efficiency, and how much they care about such things?
I somehow fail to understand what this is, but am impressed by it nonetheless. Is this purely for animation designers with coding skills? I thought animation work is done in editors with even less code required usually, but for me as a developer this seems more approachable.
I could not look at the advanced examples on my iPad though.
At least at a glance I think you’ve got this right. And I think it’s the same kind of productivity boost that came with graphics tools getting JSX/etc bridges. You can design and dev in the same environment with minimal handoff, far fewer broken expectations when they render differently due to different presentation metrics, and tons of opportunity to automate the design-build process and visual documentation.
We're more geared towards programmers as you define what each node does in their code but you can choose to expose selected node parameters when exporting, for a designer/animator to potentially tweak.
Sorry about the advanced examples, some use WebGL and might have issues on iPad Safari that we'll need to check.
Looks like a new assembly of old ideas that’s different enough it might do better for some purposes. Very exciting.
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 very seldom share anything of my own here for this reason. It’s cool to have high expectations but it’s really a shame how much people just dump on everything without any consideration for the intent or level of effort that went into something.
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.
Okay thanks Jira, sometimes people are just making stuff to learn, or explore, or experiment, or share something that addressed their own needs or wants.
I think it’s mostly that they think the people that seem targeted by the product would not (generally) use it.
That can be either an error on their part, a problem with the copy on the website, or a deliberate choice on the creators’ part (e.g. hobby project, I don’t care).
I think the negative comments are inversely proportional to the language used to hype the product or project. If you make an app that points out carcinogens in the user's grocery list, and explain that your project's mission is curing cancer then people are going to have a lot of negative things to say about how this approach will never do that, etc. Conversely, if you describe it tightly as what it is there will be less room for people to have negative takes and more for people to appreciate the project for what it is.
I encourage you to share your project. Negative comments, even if they happen, won't diminish your accomplishments.
Why are negative comments bad? I wouldn’t mind at all. Rudeness is not acceptable but people poking holes at your project is a good thing.
People poked holes at Dropbox back in the day. Just take negative comments, grow a thick skin and move on.
Please don’t hesitate one iota, would love to see your work.
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!
I agree totally. And, as a one-man-band indie developer who is totally dependent on sales of my software to make a living, the pain of low sales is much greater than the pain of any criticsm. Also a lot of the comments have been incredibly useful, even if they were a bit painful.
Been following the creators for awhile and very much happy to see them democratizing their difficult skillset.
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.
Being coders ourselves we focused on a programmer-first approach indeed. The idea came naturally from a gap we identified in our day-to-day practice at Variable.io (data-art, installations, generative systems, ...). It enables some collaboration with designers (through exposing some parameters of the UI) but still focus on the coding experience to bring our projects to life.
It's hard to overestimate the impact of this technique, though it is 5-10 years too soon. :)
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.
> 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.
Seems cool and very interesting. I don’t have too much to add beyond giving praise due to the sheer number of low-quality replies on this submission.
If the people who made this are reading; don’t let an off-day on hn discourage you.
I need something like this to let non-programmers create some basic JavaScript scripts/flows in an app I have. Obviously would need to be some level of power user but hopefully doesnt require them to know how to code. Has anyone tried this or any of the related projects and have an opinion or experience on what works best for a “normal” user?
I love this. We need to get out of the usual representations of data and get ‘out there’ a little more. Who said art and science couldn’t coalesce? Nothing wrong with a bit of wackiness. Will be following this closely.
Tangentially related, I've been thinking about how it is somewhat difficult to describe state machines in regular textual code, and it would be nice to have a drag-and-drop visual interface for mapping out the states and transitions, then tie regular code to the transition events.
Is there anything like that out there? Or a good open source diagramming library that might lend itself to prototyping this?
You might be interested in XState[0] and its visualizer[1]. It is not drag and drop, but it does provide a nice visualization that can help debug state logic. I imagine it’s possible to extend it to support visual manipulation and code generation.
looks cool guys! I'm working on something similar (won't be so vulgar as to self-promote on your post though) - it's exciting to see more people exploring this space. I think there's a lot of potential in visual programming going forwards; I know it's been explored before but it feels like smart phones pre-iPhone: lots of entries but no-one has captured the essence of it into a compelling product yet (outside of specialist but great tools like Houdini and UE Blueprints).
Have you shared this with the Future of Coding community (https://futureofcoding.org/)? They're very excited by these kinds of tools.
This is really great,loving the whole code catalog and podcast.
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 looks like Node-Red, but with less pre-made nodes, and designed to show stuff, I love the idea. Also, maybe this is a problem with my installation, but I only see one type of block "custom". If I'm supposed to use npm to install any blocks that support anything, this isn't an ideal starting point, too little information on getting started.
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.
99 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 184 ms ] threadOn 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.
"Build interactive web apps"
"Create bespoke tools"
Any examples besides weird shapes?
https://www.outsystems.com/
Like the old saying: During a gold rush, sell shovels.
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.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/927593460642615296.html
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
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”!
[0] https://github.com/nodes-io/nodes-io
*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.
The level of effort that went into something is absolutely irrelevant to your users if it doesn’t solve their problem.
That can be either an error on their part, a problem with the copy on the website, or a deliberate choice on the creators’ part (e.g. hobby project, I don’t care).
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!
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?
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.
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.
This is like saying "What if writing was about ideas, not periods?" It already is.
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 ;-)
https://www.itemis.com/en/yakindu/state-machine/
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
[1] https://futureofcoding.org/catalog/codeflow.html
[2] https://github.com/codeflowlang
How do projects like this get off the ground / get funding?
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.
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.