

NodeBox - beautiful visuals with Python - timf
http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/Home

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wisty
It looks nice, and seems to have a great community. It could learn from
graphviz and matplotlib though, and have a gallary of examples complete with
code snippets. See <http://www.graphviz.org/Gallery.php> and
<http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/gallery.html>

The NodeBox gallery is mostly about other projects that use NobeBox. That is
nice if you want to learn about linguistics or fractals, but not so great for
just learning NodeBox features.

I really love the matplotlib and graphviz galleries. Visualization of the
feature, plus working code.

Otherwise, it looks very sweet.

Edit - I'm browsing through the "Examples" directories in the installation.
It's pretty cool.

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llimllib
like the gallery at <http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/Gallery> ?

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wisty
I've seen that gallery, but it's more a showcase of external projects than a
bunch of feature examples.

The NodeBox gallery shows a lot of cool projects (something that Graphviz and
matplotlib only hint at), but it's not much use for a new user who wants to
look at pretty pictures, and then tinker with the code.

If you want to find out how to draw a graph in NodeBox, you click on the
"graph" gallery. Then you click on the "graph" wikilink. Then you scroll
through the graph tutorial until you find some code that you can run. You
still can't re-create the gallery picture, but you can do something similar, I
guess.

In graphviz and matplotlib, you go from the gallery image to the code that
created it in one click. It's much easier to discover their features.

Like I said though, NodeBox looks very cool. The images are slick, it looks
very powerful, and the community looks very smart.

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llimllib
Hmm, that's not true for all of them:
<http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/Fireworks>
<http://nodebox.net/code/index.php/Cornucopia>

but I was working off memory, and you're right, they're not all like that.
They should probably be seperated somehow?

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wisty
Separating them (or just tagging the ones that can be pasted into the code
window) would be nice.

The real issue is that everything useful (the tutorial, reference, and
library) is indexed by command name. The graphviz and matplotlib galleries
index the commands by pictures. That's a lot more discoverable and visual.

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llimllib
My pong game in 30 lines of nodebox: <http://billmill.org/pong.html> .

Nodebox rocks; I used it more seriously to create all the EPS files for my
article in python magazine about drawing trees. Here's an example; notice how
short and to the point the code is, a credit to nodebox's super simple API:
[http://github.com/llimllib/personal_code/blob/master/python/...](http://github.com/llimllib/personal_code/blob/master/python/trees/draw_ws1.py)

~~~
idm
Compelling demonstration!

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est
Nodebox for non-Mac platforms:

<http://tinkerhouse.net/shoebot/>

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joshu
I love NodeBox. I did these a while ago:

<http://www.flickr.com/photos/joshu/sets/72157605136550715/>

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bootload
_"... The idea of a state machine, and most of the command set, is adopted
from Processing, an open project initiated by Ben Fry and Casey Reas. ..."_

Processing boxed up as an app. I would like to give it a try but I'm ✸nix,
✸bsd and at last resort Win. What I do like about it is it makes doing the
same thing with processing, easier. So for that reason alone the product is
worth learning from.

\- <http://processing.org/> & <http://mobile.processing.org/>

\- <http://processingjs.org> (javascript)

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joshu
And, you know, in Python.

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theli0nheart
This looks like a really well-documented and full-featured library. I'll
definitely be looking into it when I've got more time.

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gord
excellent potential as an educational tool.

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DannoHung
Does this support significantly enhanced capacities or a significantly
different programming model than processing?

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llimllib
no.

