Show HN: Thi.ng – open-source building blocks for computational design • Hacker News Board

Show HN: Thi.ng – open-source building blocks for computational design

#1

Post by toxmeister » Sat, Nov 28, 2020, 12:36 PM UTC

The first stage of the new http://thi.ng website is live, an up-to-date & hopefully more useful springboard to the 250+ projects and overview of my opensource activity since 2006...

Work is ongoing, collecting & re-organizing projects, assets, documentation and extracting interrelationships (incl. older work & music projects (e.g. http://thi.ng/synstack related), clients/people...). Aim is a proper archive of the past 20+ years of outputs & encounters.

This is the first website update since 2015. As the timeline visualizations show, building(http://thi.ng) > marketing(http://thi.ng) - maybe unusual these days, but hey... :)

The entire site is generated w/ tools from the http://thi.ng/umbrella collection, e.g. http://thi.ng/egf (graph file format), http://thi.ng/csv (semantic CSV parsing), http://thi.ng/transducers (functional data transformations), http://thi.ng/defmulti (multiple dispatch for template engine), http://thi.ng/hiccup (HTML/SVG generation), http://thi.ng/viz (timeline visualizations), http://thi.ng/color (heatmap gradients)

There's also a massive spreadsheet (148k cells adjacency matrix) to centrally define & manage the 570+ tags used to categorize the 257 projects/repositories and to batch update their package files (edits ongoing, much fun!). The tag/project relationships are compiled into an HTML list with project IDs stored as base90-encoded data attributes for each tag in the tag cloud (http://thi.ng/#tags)

The timeline visualizations are generated directly from local Git repos, package files and associated metadata stored in a number of linked http://thi.ng/egf graphs. The site toolchain will be released in due course...

Last but not least, any constructive feedback (good or bad) is very welcome! The next phase will include more individual project details, images, making-of docs, videos, xrefs etc. Currently, just a step in the right direction...

Re: Show HN: Thi.ng – open-source building blocks for computational design

#2

Post by vanderZwan » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 8:11 AM UTC

Aah, thi.ng! The creative coding framework I've been meaning to check out for years but never have! But the things (hah) made in it have always amazed me!

So one bit of feedback on the site: it's fantastic as a portfolio site. However, while it's great for getting an impression for everything made with this framework and how large the framework is, what is missing is a big "START HERE" button.

I get why that might feel like something you don't need: th.ing is set up differently than Processing, p5.js, OpenFrameworks or any game-loop based creative coding framework. So there is no real centralized starting point. Which is fine, but then that has to be clearly communicated too, and it isn't. It's mentioned in very thin fine print under the How? section, which is hidden under a "read more" link when viewing the website on mobile (also, I do get that thi.ng/umbrella is kind of emphasized as an implicit suggested starting point, but it's still a bit confusing).

So basically, the discoverability for how people should get into the framework could use a lot of improvement. It could use a bit more awareness of expectations of your visitors and how you either meet or break those.

Re: Show HN: Thi.ng – open-source building blocks for computational design

#3

Post by WalterGR » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 8:15 AM UTC

So thi.ng is a collection of open-source libraries for writing software? What am I missing?

Re: Show HN: Thi.ng – open-source building blocks for computational design

#4

Post by mrtweetyhack » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 8:48 AM UTC

WalterGR wrote: post #3

So thi.ng is a collection of open-source libraries for writing software? What am I missing?

look like a whole lot of nothing

Re: Show HN: Thi.ng – open-source building blocks for computational design

#5

Post by lemming » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 9:10 AM UTC

I know you did a lot of work in Clojure(Script) originally, and IIRC you mostly switched to Typescript. Is that correct? How many of your projects are now designed to be consumed from CLJS vs JS/TS?

Re: Show HN: Thi.ng – open-source building blocks for computational design

#6

Post by Netcob » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 9:13 AM UTC

vanderZwan wrote: post #2

Aah, thi.ng ! The creative coding framework I've been meaning to check out for years but never have! But the things (hah) made in it have always amazed me! So one bit of feedback on the site: it's fantastic as a portfolio site. However, while it's great for getting an impression for everything made with this framework and how large the framework is, what is missing is a big "START HERE" button. I get why that might f…

Maybe it's just me, but that seems like part of a common problem on websites submitted to HN - you go to gooblorgs.io, because now apparently it is compatible with snootlr and that somehow got it to the top of the page, only to discover that the entire website doesn't contain a single line that explains what a gooblorg actually does, or would even point you in the general area of the industry this is related to.

Re: Show HN: Thi.ng – open-source building blocks for computational design

#7

Post by tiborsaas » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 9:25 AM UTC

WalterGR wrote: post #3

So thi.ng is a collection of open-source libraries for writing software? What am I missing?

Is that not enough?

Re: Show HN: Thi.ng – open-source building blocks for computational design

#8

Post by WalterGR » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 9:32 AM UTC

tiborsaas wrote: post #7

WalterGR wrote: post #3

So thi.ng is a collection of open-source libraries for writing software? What am I missing?

Is that not enough?

Both the text of the submission and the other comments here suggest that I am missing something. As a specific example, I don’t expect to see making-of videos for collections of general-purpose libraries.

So I’m curious what that “something” is.

Do you know the answer to my question?

Re: Show HN: Thi.ng – open-source building blocks for computational design

#9

Post by gitgud » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 9:47 AM UTC

This site is a bit confusing at first, originally I thought they were modular libraries for writing general software.

But it seems to be a collection of tools specifically for generating computational art/design. Still impressive and useful though!

Re: Show HN: Thi.ng – open-source building blocks for computational design

#10

Post by dimovich » Mon, Nov 30, 2020, 9:57 AM UTC

You posted on a full moon day, and this is exactly the vibe I get from your projects. Thank you for the wonderful libraries! I've been using thi.ng/geom and thi.ng/color before and the code is easy to use and modify.