My first animgif programmed in Nodebox. I still prefer code, but I see the advantages of Nodebox:
- Pause, play and rewind your animation.
- Go to the previous and next frames.
- Tweak values and modify your program *while it runs*. No need to stop and restart your program. This is great for experimentation.
- Export a range of frames.
- Export an mp4 movie or a vector PDF file.
- You can write your own modules in Python and Clojure.
What I don’t like:
- No animgif nor gif export.
- Each time I export I must set the range and file format.
- Frame rate not so high.
- No access to the great collection of Processing libraries (midi, webcam, graphic tablet, OSC, etc).
It’s great for people learning to code, and for those who don’t like typing code. It may also be great for sketching concepts, tweaking values and experimenting, to later port the idea to an environment that performs faster.
Our creations are influenced by the tools we use. I suspect the kinds of creations we produce by typing code (Processing, Open Frameworks, SuperCollider) and by connecting nodes with wires (Nodebox, PD) can differ, the same way the kinds of results we get when using different programming languages can also be different. For instance, some languages make it easier to write recursive programs. Other languages make it easy to work with big data sets, or with strings. I wonder… what is Nodebox best at?