In-viewer / runtime / app GUI nodes, presets management, save and load

This is a group of features, they are conceptually tied together, but could be split in two or three features requests depending on Vuo’s team developpement strategy.

A. GUI nodes library, like controlP5 for processing

The GUI elements would have input ports, to be able to be controlled by anything else (hardware is obvious), and provide visual feedback.
Reference: http://www.sojamo.de/libraries/controlP5/

B. A preset system, as in Max

This stores all values of the current GUI set. Reference: http://cycling74.com/docs/max6/dynamic/c74_docs.html#preset

C. An easy Save/Load mechanism.

Could be tied to the preset system, should probably be.
The Kineme save/load plugins where very useful, but re-injecting loaded values was a source of headache, not always easy. Vuo has a flow control though, so i tend to believe things would be a lot easier anyway. Reference: http://kineme.net/release/FileTools/11

Here’s why:

  • This an area where QC fell unfortunately very short, as visual artists are reluctant to dive into Xcode and Interface Builder. Since Vuo process is not framerate dependent, and natively provides multi-windows, this makes totally sense. And even more, given the fact that mobile platforms are already on your roadmap.

  • It would totally change the status of what could be done with Vuo. We could build tools. From visual compositions to self-sufficient software, targeted at other users. Software that could itself be used to produce something else. Vuo would become a fully fledged software development IDE.

  • It would give the ability to a developer/designer to create a dedicated visual interface to edit and store as many states of his program as needed. This is very useful for media installations, as well as for live performance.

As an example, we have an installation project and must manage 40 different states of 50 layers over time, including audio and lights. All kinds of data are necessary, including colours, size, position, duration, sometimes text strings. Can be done in QC, but things are getting ridiculously hard coded at some point, given the fact that there are no presets tools. There’s no way to create a dedicated editor without diving into XCode. That was of course not meant to be in the first place.

  • It could also lead to more interaction between the lead developer / designer and other designers who are not developpers themselves (or are still in the learning curve). Could attract new users by introducing them to Vuo through that kind of collaboration.

  • Vuo could then also be used for sketching OSC / MIDI / UDP / HTTP interfaces, that controls software or hardware. Live performance? Robotics? Science labs?

Thanks, @ddelcourt. We’re working on some mockups for GUI nodes, and will post them here soon for discussion.

This would be fantastic, especially point A.

I’ve built some tools myself just using Quartz Composer and QuartzBuilder, but the results were always pretty limited (and it’s rather difficult to create on-screen sliders!). I ended up having to use a lot of Javascript, but at least the iterator patch made it easy to create multiple sets of similar functions.

Several slightly more unique features I had to build:

  • Thumbnail toggles with active state overlay.
  • Sliders with invisible detents that snap to the nearest multiple of 5.
  • Button with built in progress indication (the pressed state wipes back to the unpressed state in this case).

Screenshots of one of my QC apps (this one creates seamlessly tiled normal maps for 3D vfx work) attached.

Edit: Just about forgot, each slider is reset to a default value when right-clicking, for quickly overriding everything back to the standard settings. Preset value groups would be far more powerful, for sure!  

@ddelcourt — Nice work! We’ve taken a more in-depth look at this and will get more specific as we go forward. Wanted to touch base and let you know where we’re at. In short, we’re hoping to have part A by 1.0 and B and C for future releases thereafter. We’ll be talking to you. Excellent to see this broached.

@ddelcourt,

We’ve split this up into separate feature requests and opened them up for voting, so we can get a better idea of the value of each of them to the Vuo community.

We’ve marked this feature request as a duplicate.

Thanks for your input. We appreciate it!