Happy new year, everyone!
It has been a great big year in the cables-universe - we made a lot of changes, improved stuff that was already there and added new features. We even fixed one or two bugs!
The cables-community was busy and growing in 2021 - we see a lot of new people in our regular meetups, registered users are constantly increasing and so is the number of created and published projects. Keep up the good work, and join the discussion on discord, the forums and the public issue tracker.
If you feel lost, need a quick introduction or want to know how to use new features, check our YouTube channel that revved up again in the second half of 2021 with a new tutorial video every week. Like, subscribe, comment...as they say!
Shall we dive into what happened in the last 12 Months? Well, let's!
The Big Changes
GLUI:
After almost a year in development, we switched the cables patch editor from being rendered in SVG to an accelerated WebGL rendered one - as it should be! We took it a step further and deleted the SVG renderer entirely from the user interface in the November release.
Having the editor no longer draw operators and cables with SVG but being completely rendered in WebGL gives massive improvements in regards to performance and a lot of new possibilities for improvement.
We also reworked almost all of the cables-ui to be sitting on a modern JavaScript foundation. This gives additional future-proofness and more room for neat UI improvements as can be seen in the latest "Viz"-family of ops and the addition of Areas to group your ops together.
With this step made, watch out for more improvements to the UI to make your patching-life easier, quicker and even more fun!
GLTF:
Workflows with imported 3D GLTF Scenes in cables got a major boost over the last year. We introduced a lot of new ops that make working with materials, cameras and animations exported from i.e. Blender a breeze. It all culminated in adding support for skins and bones in November, and while we were at it (and since we still target the web) we also added Draco Compression support. You can even compress your 3D models right inside the cables editor file manager!
Even though we are super happy to see these already used "in the wild", we flanked these features with a few tutorial videos to guide your workflow transition a bit easier. Check them out!
In The Wild
Workshops:
Apart from a few real-world projects we also set aside a bit of time to teach cables to students and interested audiences all around Europe. Sometimes remotely, sometimes in-person. We held workshops at Hyper Island, returned to Muthesius Art School in Kiel - spreading the word on demo making, and introduced cables to the students at Ostfalia University as well as Beckmans Design School.
Thanks to everyone inviting us and giving us a chance to show the possibilities of cables to various audiences. If you'd like to have cables as part of your curriculum in 2022, feel free to contact us on discord. We'd love to come!
Nodevember:
For the first time, we invited the cables community to take part in nodevember - a month of challenging topics to create patches for. And what a month it was! Brave participants created a staggering 53 patches and shared them with the world. It was incredible to see the cables community being super-active during November and having new public patches for the given topics everyday!
We even made it to the big list of software used for the online event, awesome! We will definitely be doing this again in 2022, so reserve November for some intense patching sessions!
What's Next In 2022?
As you might have read between the lines, we are super happy with the last year. Thanks to everyone contributing to cables in one way or the other, be it by joining our discord meetups, giving feedback on releases, hinting us at new things to try out, helping other people on discord and the forums or also "just" spreading the word on social media. Thanks!
But are we done? Far from it. Be prepared for another year of new and improved stuff in cables, like working on patches together simultaneously, better ways of contributing code to cables, more features using your webcam for AR or a complete rework of the cables community websites. Stay tuned!
again: happy new year everyone, we are looking forward for the next 12 months with you!
yours,
the cables team