Vuo is just great., in my opinion and experience working with vuo is a bit confusing regarding the nodes data in / data out , ( identifying data types)
this problem has been sorted by Max msp having a name convention and clear help -sample files, for example working with visuals you usually use Jit.x or jit.gl.x
for sound nodes have a ~ at the end, the cord / lines have different coloring scheme, etc. I love vuo and want to start working more often with vuo but the editor interface will benefit from a clear emveriioment and workflow.
Thanks for the suggestion, @balam.
Just to make sure you’re aware, Vuo has some editor features to try to help with data types. You can see a port’s data type by clicking on the port, which opens a port popover. When you start dragging a cable from a port, the ports that it can connect to are highlighted — those with the identical data type are most highlighted, those where the connection can be made with a type-converter node are somewhat less highlighted, and ports with incompatible data types are not highlighted. When you connect a cable between two data types that can be converted, a type-converter node is inserted automatically.
That said, I’m sure there are ways we could improve the user interface for data types and make things less confusing. Considering the number of different data types that exist Vuo (dozens), I’m not sure how well Max’s solutions to data types would translate over to Vuo, but we can probably learn something from them. Could you give some examples where you’ve found data types confusing in Vuo, and where Max handles the situation more gracefully?
Hi Jaymie thanks for your reply.
sure, as example , add an image background to a compositon that renders objects , I had to try several nodes to finally discover the image to object node.
this in maxmsp land could be easly done using a jit.matrix node. what it makes it easy is intuition = working in max visual nodes is called jitter so all the nodes related to visual are called using the ji.x prefix, and having an auto prefill features help to discover nodes quickly. matrix in max are like bridges for data. Again I love vuo , vuo takes beyond what maxmsp jitter can do, and maybe do some pre-made nodes that do the core functions could make Vuo a great visual programming tool for Artist ( non programers) like maxmsp did with vizzy and Beap. best
Your comment touches on some suggestions that other people have had for usability improvements: Background Color and More type conversions. We’ve had some discussions, but I don’t think any community feature requests yet, about how in Max you can double-click on the graph and start typing to create a node, and how that idea might translate to Vuo. It would be cool if you could right-click on a port and get a mini node library of all nodes that could connect to the port, for example.
I wonder if some of the non-intuitive things will start to feel more intuitive as you use Vuo more and get used to its conventions. Like with Max, if someone’s brand new to it, maybe they don’t know that “matrix” means bridges for data, but they learn it from experience and then it makes perfect sense. With Vuo, maybe you don’t know immediately that if you search the node library for two data types, like “object” and “image”, you find nodes converting between them. So if things seem non-intuitive at first but then start to make sense over time, I wonder if there are things we can do to speed up the process.