Last year in cables - cables.gl

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What a weird year it was. Despite all the hardships there has been a lot of stuff going on in the cables universe. Quite a lot actually, as we found out collecting everything we wanted to mention in this blog post.

- Our community grew by about 30%

- We explored streaming to twitch regularly and ended up with weekly Discord meetups

- We released five big updates this year

- We introduced features, bugfixes and improvements in closing 832 issues from our backlog

- We now offer around 1600 ops for all your needs

- 33 videos have been published including examples, tutorials, livestreams, ...

- People created about 47k patches in the time since we started cables. Wow!

cables has been used in workshops at universities, for installations all over the world, for commercial projects, hobby projects, proof of concepts, art and who knows what else.

Projects using cables won prices in competitions, were seen/used by lots of people and generally made the offline and online world a more beautiful place.

Thank you everyone who made this possible!

Releases

Last year saw five big updates that we made to cables. In February, we gave you GLTF-Support, working with MSDF-Fonts and basic "Multiplayer"-Functionality, April came with a lot of cleanup and fixes, July gave you the possibility to play with physics a bit, made sharing your patches easier working with collaborators and gave you data nerds a bit more functionality on arrays.

A huge cleanup and bugfixing release in November still had some impressive new features. We started our inquiry into machine learning by supporting teachablemachines (thanks Mick) and made exporting patches to external services easier.

We topped of the year with a rehaul of how audio works in cables by making the existing audio ops more foolproof and adding few missing ones.

We also plan to have more regular and smaller updates in 2021, so be prepared for roughly monthly news from what can be done in cables now.

But what did you people do with all of that? Let's see:

Top patches of the year

These are the top patches of the year, ordered by likes in descending order, attributed to the patch-owner:

We also had three cables jams, with people competing for the win given certain restrictions and rules. Thanks for all your contributions, keep 'em coming!

Projects

People use cables for work and privately, for money and for free, for arts and commercial projects.

We know that wirmachenbunt used the GLTF-Ops to create the amazing website for logicx. mata.london used it to create their garden. plusx created parts of their new website using cables.

holon and mfx won prizes at demoparties with cathodoluminescence, gravity and nevoa. Farbrausch released Aphelion. Sofia Crespo and Feileacan McCormick gave us the "arificial remnants".

undev and artifical rome created "born of a dream" together and raumHOCH used cables to power their "gründermotor" as well as the presentation of the "smartquart" grid. undev contributed to the new website of dotfly and made the background animation for the (sadly cancelled) ableton loop conference.

But that is not everything... to keep you all on your toes about what we already have and what is new in cables, we used twitch a lot to show people what we are up to. And there have been quite a few streams, some educational, some informative and some plain fun.

Streams

We taught you how to VJ - using cables.

We tried to live-copy some pieces of art that we like - using cables.

We talked about behind-the-scenes-stuff and introduced new features and updates - of cables.

We showed you how to make your hat blink or make demos - with cables.

And: kikohs made a whole intdrodiction series for datavizualization - in cables

So as you can surely see: It has been quite a year for cables and the community. Stay tuned for things to come!

Happy new year,

from team cables!