Cables Standalone Recap - cables.gl

Almost a year ago we decided to start planning and prototyping cables standalone. It's about time we show where we are with it now!

With the help of the KHM and NLnet we went through, several releases in the last months, gathered your feedback, updated our documentation and released videos to guide you while using cables standalone. With this post, we'll show you some of the most exciting features of the standalone version of cables.gl.

But do not fear! This is not the end of the journey. Whenever we update cables.gl with new features or operators, cables standalone will also receive all these latest and greatest updates in a new version.

Just download the most recent version, and be on the bleeding edge, online and offline!

Try it now!

Work offline and independently

Download cables standalone to work on your patches on the go and whenever you do not have an internet connection. Take your standalone projects to the club, into the museum or to the streets. Cables standalone gives you full offline freedom. No need to upload your assets to cables.gl servers - keep local versions of your projects, and store cables standalone alongside your projects to continue working on them in years to come.

Local Editor

You can now use your preferred editor to code ops. Every operator used in a patch will update and execute automatically when its code changes.

Fire up your favorite IDE and code your own ops.

And the best thing: All assets used in a patch have the same behaviour, so you can use photoshop to edit images or blender to export GLTF and have all these changes reflected in the patch immediately.

Break out of the browser sandbox

Native Ops

Cables standalone gives you all the freedom to access your local file system or any other nodejs functionality. You can use `path`, `fs`, `net` and all the likes, simply by adding `op.require` and starting from there. To make it easier, we added some ops for you...ever ran a HttpServer from your patch?

JavaScript offers a wide collection of libraries via its dependency manager `npm`. A lot of these packages are now available to use in cables standalone, just try adding the package name in the op dependencies and use `op.require`.

Store, organize, backup and share

While we like the aspect of keeping your patch local, contained and offline, sometimes you want to share what you did with the world. cables.gl still is the place to do that.

Use the "patch export" to download your (or any other) patch to continue working in standalone. It works the other way around as well, creating a backup in cables standalone and importing this to cables.gl to create a new version of the patch which then can be shared with the world.

Op Directories

Every project has its special case of ops. With the standalone you can collect all your ops into directories on your disk (or network storage) and add them to your project as needed. This way you can create special collections of operators that you simply add when needed. Or you zip up these directories and share them with the world to use!

Contribute to cables development

One of the main motivations of creating the cables standalone version was to give the world a way to contribute to cables and develop it further. This resulted in us deciding to open up the source of cables, all the ops, its ui and the standalone version itself.

You can check out all of this in the cables repositories on GitHub, clone them, fork them and send those pull requests our way. Even if you are not a coder, you can contribute to cables by writing or improving documentation.

All of this is released under a very permissive licence for you to not worry about your specific use case. Have at it!

Sharing is caring

Did you create something worth sharing? Added a feature? Fixed a bug? Updated some libraries? Let us know by creating a pull-request, either directly on GitHub or by using a fork of the repositories available to you.

Check out the documentation on how to build and run cables locally. Or watch this short video. Even if you are starting from zero you should be ready to code in less than 15 minutes. Give it a go!