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Luna 1.0 Beta is out

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Re: Luna 1.0 Beta is out

#81

Post by anigbrowl »

kirillseva wrote: post #76
anigbrowl wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

people definitely don't want to code with a mouse dragging and zooming Actually that is exactly what I want which is why I signed up for the Luna beta months ago. We have had flow based programming for a while in the synth and robotics communities and nesting diagrams within each other is the normal thing. For many tasks you can produce elaborate working interactive UIs without ever writing code. My favorite software…

would you care to name that favorite software that has reoriented itself towards Ruby? Curious to learn more

iirc it's flowstone DSP, last time I looked there was still a free version though it's not an open source project. Would recommend to anyone as an example of good UI in this area

Re: Luna 1.0 Beta is out

#82

Post by Stratoscope »

wdanilo wrote: post #59
Stratoscope wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks very cool! I especially like the geographical stuff, that being something that is dear to my heart. I have a couple of questions that may sound trivial but are important to me. I haven't tried installing the studio yet, so please forgive me if installing it would answer these. First, all the screenshots, along with the doc pages, use a dark theme with very low contrast: only 47% contrast on the body copy i…

@Stratoscope thank you for such a detailed comment. We are fully aware of the topics you've mentioned. I'll try to cover all your questions in the following points: 1. Screenshot contrasts – we will be working on providing setting desired contrast in Luna just by selecting a predefined one from a drop-down menu. We are not there yet, because to make it working properly it is a little tricky thing. However, please kee…

Thank you for the thoughtful reply! I will hop over to the GitHub issues for more detailed discussion. A few thoughts in the meantime...

I tried the A icon in the docs - thanks for pointing this out, I didn't notice it at first. The light theme is an improvement over the dark one, but it isn't very readable either. The problem is that nasty Quicksand font. It is very hard to read! I knocked it out and the page fell back to Helvetica Neue, which is much easier to read. The line-height: 1.7 seems a bit excessive too, but that is a minor thing.

I'm viewing the page in Chrome on Windows 10 with displays in the neighborhood of 200 DPI and display scaling set to 225%.

> Working with white theme a whole day could be a pain

It certainly isn't for me. I use light themes for everything - all my editors and other tools, all websites, everything.

I wonder if the idea of light themes causing eye strain may come from having improperly calibrated displays? I calibrate all my displays to a pure white background. This is essential for me, since most laptop displays I've used have a pronounced blue-green tint. The worst one was a ThinkPad Yoga Gen 2 WQHD that I helped a friend set up. Out of the box, the display had an intense green cast and was truly painful to look at. After I calibrated the display it was a pleasure to use.

I did try installing Studio on Windows after I wrote my first message. The darkness and lack of contrast in the installer made it feel a bit sad, as if it didn't really want me to see what it had to say. Alas, the installer got stuck at 34% with no files installed, so I didn't get a chance to try the actual app yet. I will revisit that when I get some time.

Of course this whole area is one where different people will feel differently - you guys love the current theme, where I find it very unusable. So I'm glad to hear that customizable themes are in the works, because I would have a hard time with the current one.

Regarding proportional fonts, yes, I use them for all of my coding, and have done so for at least 10-15 years. In particular, proportional fonts let me use a larger font size and still fit more text on the screen than I could with a smaller monospaced font.

I don't use monospaced fonts at all any more except for specialized situations like hex dumps. All of the editors and tools I use support proportional fonts beautifully. So my advice on fonts is simple: don't assume that proportional fonts are unusable for coding and development; give them the same support as monospaced fonts.

Looking at the animated screenshots, I don't see much there that would have any difficulty with a proportional font. The one possible exception is some right-aligned text. If you use spaces to line that text up, it won't work well in a proportional font. But if you use truly right-aligned text it will be fine.

Re: Luna 1.0 Beta is out

#83

Post by Stratoscope »

singingboyo wrote: post #45
Stratoscope wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks very cool! I especially like the geographical stuff, that being something that is dear to my heart. I have a couple of questions that may sound trivial but are important to me. I haven't tried installing the studio yet, so please forgive me if installing it would answer these. First, all the screenshots, along with the doc pages, use a dark theme with very low contrast: only 47% contrast on the body copy i…

OT: Do dark but high-contrast themes have the same issues? I ask because, just to reduce eye strain in the other direction, I avoid bright screens where possible. Probably a side effect of often doing things late or even at normal times during winter. In any case, if I ever built a website it'd probably be dark-ish, but knowing about the pitfalls might help avoid them. Even more off-topic, but in the interest of eyes…

Your comment about the blue filter got me thinking. I assume this filter reduces the amount of blue light, is that correct?

As I mentioned in another comment, I've found that many laptop screens have a pronounced blue-green cast out of the box. The worst ones we have here are a late 2013 MacBook Pro Retina and a ThinkPad X1 Yoga Gen 2 WQHD. These both are difficult to look at with the factory calibration, especially the X1 Yoga which I found literally painful to use in the first part of the Windows setup, before calibrating the display. Everything was an intense green that felt like it was burning my eyes. I can see why someone using a display like that might prefer a dark theme, just to knock out that awful blue-green.

But after I calibrated the display to a pure white, it looked beautiful, just like our other calibrated high-DPI displays.

One other benefit to calibrating displays is when using multiple displays. I use a 24" 4K/UHD display in portrait mode along with whichever laptop I'm using at the moment. (A portrait mode display plus a landscape display is a wonderful combination, for example an entire PDF page fits on the portrait display with no scrolling.) Having the colors look the same on both displays - especially the white backgrounds - makes things much more pleasing to the eye.

To your question about high-contrast dark themes, yes, I have the same trouble with those. Dark themes just don't work for me, nor do low-contract themes, whether dark or light.

Re: Luna 1.0 Beta is out

#84

Post by garyclarke27 »

wdanilo wrote: post #40
kustosz wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! For now the best way to interact with Postgres is, I think, using an HTTP wrapper server. A better way to do this needs to be created. Maybe as a community effort? ;)

@garyclarke27 if you are interested in helping us create such binding, we would love to support your effort as much as we can. Just tell us about it using our chat / forum ( http://chat.luna-lang.org ) or ( http://discuss.luna-lang.org ) and we will figure out the best way to make it happen! :) The basic building blocks are already there!

Hi Wojciech. I suspect that an ‘out of the box’ integration with Postgres plus options for some of your text representations to be expressed in SQL instead of your language would be a killer feature. No ORM though - I love SQL - I would happily pay £1000’s for such I for example come from a finance background - now I design ERP / CRM software for my own company, I have a UI team but I would like to express some UI myself, to get immediate feedback, to iterate rapidly, a WYSIWYG tool would be perfect for me. I have total expertize with SQL an Excel, but not so much with Javascript. SQL and the Relational Model can be purely functional if immutable, ie insert only, I also use graphs a lot in my schema, they are just relations, Postgres can build closure tables remarkably quickly to create indexes for instant path queries. My main constraint is time not cash, can your system easily interact with a REST endpoint? Postgrest (written in Haskel) makes these quite easy to setup. I auto generate SQL language functions for all data inserts, no direct to table allowed. So interaction with Views and Functions is my main requirement.

Re: Luna 1.0 Beta is out

#85

Post by raytracer »

spiralganglion wrote: post #78
raytracer wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This looks great. Congratulations on releasing the beta. * Is it possible to work with incoming data in real time? * Is it possible to use MIDI and audio as data sources? * If so, can the applications also output MIDI and audio in real time?

It sounds like you’re looking for a nicer version of Max/MSP. I’d certainly be keen to see Luna’s GUI applied to that domain, but I think it’d be better to hope that Max take UI / language design lessons from Luna than Luna add audio processing. The std lib in Max is so astoundingly rich — the number of highly optimized DSP ops implemented in C is going to be hard to match. Even if, say, there was a way to run Luna o…

> It sounds like you’re looking for a nicer version of Max/MSP

Exactly. Max/MSP is great and I really want to like it, but despite making several attempts at using it in my practice, it hasn't stuck yet. Max doesn't have enough abstractions to make in depth development enjoyable IMHO. After a certain point I get bogged down and long for a regular programming language with an IDE. I'd probably enjoy Max more if I was comfortable in C.

Max's std lib is rich and it would hurt to start from scratch in another environment, but you don't need that many DSP modules to start building interesting patches. An LFO, filter, ADSR and an oscillator get's you a long way towards a usable synth. And there are many open source libraries to draw from.

Re: Luna 1.0 Beta is out

#86

Post by aflinik »

gatmne wrote: post #69
wdanilo wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

@moondoge, if you don't want to provide your mail, just write anything in this field, we do NOT validate it in any way. However, we would be very thankful if you provide your real mail address, so we can track how Luna is used and improve the experience. Every data we collect is described here: http://www.luna-lang.org/alpha-data.html . We try to collect only insensitive data, that tell us how Luna is used and how we…

Software that collects and sends back any form of information is a big no-no unless it's opt-in. It's not acceptable when vscode does it. It's not acceptable when .net-core does it. It isn't acceptable when Luna does it. If you want your users to help you learn how Luna is used and preforms in real environments, you ask for them for feedback rather than forcefully extract it. Having telemetry enabled by default (or m…

I totally agree with you on the mandatory part, I’d hope it would be widely accepted that opt-in is the way to go in such cases.

Although I need to point out there’s a huge difference between what people say vs what they actually do (see https://www.nngroup.com/articles/first-rule-of-usability-don...) and I can’t imagine an effective product development process that ignores the actual usage data.

Re: Luna 1.0 Beta is out

#88

Post by pritambarhate »

wdanilo wrote: post #38
bsaul wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see really fast and hard to understand animations. What i mean is a 20 minute video demonstrating how to solve a real problem in the environment.

@bsaul, video tutorials are a very interesting idea. In the first release, however, we have incorporated few toy-projects and interactive tutorial, which guides you step by step inside the product. Do you think video tutorials are better to understand / follow than examples or interactive tutorials ?

Yes, video tutorials are very important for visual tools. I used to prefer books (and still do for digging deep into a tool) but these days to learn anything new in computing I prefer videos. That way I can just see how it works in 30 mins rather than wasting a few hours to setup environment, learn basic stuff and try it out.

If the video intrigues me then I invest time in setting it up and reading the documentation.

Re: Luna 1.0 Beta is out

#89

Post by VladimirGolovin »

kustosz wrote: post #2

Hi, I'm one of Luna founders, I'll be happy to answer any questions! :)

I'm trying Luna under a non-admin account in Windows 10. I tried to install it for the first time and forgot to turn Avast antivirus off. It blocked tar2.exe execution, so I had to turn it off and reinstall. It downloaded and installed fine, but I can't figure out how to run it: there's no shortcut in Start menu. Does Luna create one, when installed normally?
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