This looks like the same basic concept as Apple's Quartz Composer, which was/is really quite awesome (and comes with Apple's developer tools). Except Moonbase is javascript based, and I don't see any reason why it couldn't be made embeddable and (eventually) into a serious tool for web developers.
Moonbase feels a little toy-ish at the moment, but it doesn't need to. Quartz Composer has a bunch of programming-like features, including nestable sub-compositions, the ability to accept user input, iterators, etc, that make the system really powerful. I hope the moonbase people start copying as many of those features as they can.
Along with Quartz Composer, a number of other node-based graph editing environments have been very inspirational. MaxMSP, vvvv, LabView, and Grasshopper have all provided for great metaphors to learn from and extend.
We decided to launch with just 6 nodes and just a single runtime, from a working total of about 50 nodes spread across 4 different runtimes, including an audio engine built using the Web Audio API, which, funnily enough, was the first runtime.
The theory was that by removing features for the initial launch we could try and polish up a much smaller set of features.
BTW, as a sort of easter egg, all of those additional nodes and runtimes are there... I'll leave that as an exercise for the hackers out there to discover them! We plan on formally exposing them in the coming weeks.
Comments
This looks like the same basic concept as Apple's Quartz Composer, which was/is really quite awesome (and comes with Apple's developer tools). Except Moonbase is javascript based, and I don't see any reason why it couldn't be made embeddable and (eventually) into a serious tool for web developers.
Moonbase feels a little toy-ish at the moment, but it doesn't need to. Quartz Composer has a bunch of programming-like features, including nestable sub-compositions, the ability to accept user input, iterators, etc, that make the system really powerful. I hope the moonbase people start copying as many of those features as they can.
>I don't see any reason why it couldn't be made embeddable
It already is embeddable! http://moonbase.com/pasquale/20
Along with Quartz Composer, a number of other node-based graph editing environments have been very inspirational. MaxMSP, vvvv, LabView, and Grasshopper have all provided for great metaphors to learn from and extend.
We decided to launch with just 6 nodes and just a single runtime, from a working total of about 50 nodes spread across 4 different runtimes, including an audio engine built using the Web Audio API, which, funnily enough, was the first runtime.
The theory was that by removing features for the initial launch we could try and polish up a much smaller set of features.
BTW, as a sort of easter egg, all of those additional nodes and runtimes are there... I'll leave that as an exercise for the hackers out there to discover them! We plan on formally exposing them in the coming weeks.
easter egg: CTRL+N and ''audio file", "audio input", "audio output", "grayscale", "hue_adjust", "scale", "sprite"
back on sorting out how to delete a node ;)