Uncategorized Archives - cables.gl

June 2025 Release

After about six months since the last release we are excited to share a huge update on what has been happening on cables.gl. We have been hard at work delivering new features, powerful ops, and countless improvements to make your patching experience even better.

As always you can jump right into all the changes by reading the raw data in the changelog, or you keep reading, and we walk you through some of the more interesting changes. We will also give an outlook into the future...

Along with everything we will show you in this rundown, we changed a lot of things in the background, making things run faster, more reliable and make them more future-proof to build on this foundation later. Some smaller things have also changed on the cables.gl website. More elements are reachable via the keyboard and the general placement of elements and actions has been unified in a few places. We hope you still find your way around.

But, to stay focussed, here are the big, visible ones:

Editor improvements

Rearrange ops

Rearranging ops can be both tedious and satisfying. It can be more satisfying from now on by holding down the shift key while moving any op around. This way the op will only move on one axis and snap to fitting places.

Using your keyboard

The parameter panel for each op got an update to make it more accessible using only the keyboard. Pressing the tab key will get your to the next option in the panel, shift-tab will navigate backwards. No need to move your hands away from they keyboard anymore!

Op highlight colors

are now displayed as a left border and will not colorize the whole op.

Shortcut search

Did you know entering "rtt" or "mift" in the opselect will give you Ops.Gl.RenderToTexture and Ops.Gl.Meshes.MeshInstancerFromTexture respectively? We tweaked the scoring and the results of these searches a bit to make it even faster to reach those ops with the long names...looking at you "aoofb"!

Quicktrigger

And as a small convenience while patching, every op with a inTriggerButton port will now show the trigger button in the parameter panel, even when the port is linked.

Copy your assets

Cables now lets you copy all the referenced assets in a patch to the local patch via an icon in the file manager or command in the command pallette. This will copy the asset from its former location, update all the ops using that asset and thus remove the reference to the patch holding the asset.

Search for usages

To check if this worked, or to find usages of assets in a patch we added and improved the search-button in the asset details to find any usage of that asset easily. And while we are in the asset details...did you know you can edit text-files right in the cables editor. Now even has more and better options for syntax highlighting.

Simple edit

From the parameter panel of any op working with files the input port has been reworked to give more information about the asset location and make it easier to work with external urls, as opposed to files uploaded to the patch. If the file can be edited in the cables editor it will now show an icon to open the editor to start your changes.

Manage your ops

The "Manage Op" tab got a lot more powerful and more informative with this update. It is now the central place to make changes to any operator. Be it cloning, renaming, adding dependencies or attachments or even deleting the op.

A simple click on the icon above the param panel will get you to all the information (description, visibility, changelog, ...) and let you manage your op. To make it a bit more clear what you are working on we now show the full op name and namespace here and in the opselect.

New standalone version

While the standalone version of cables follows the development state of cables more closely, we give it a new minor version number with every release of cables.gl and announce some special features in this blog post. All the changes to the cables editor are usually also available in the standalone version, so check that out as well.

Better video support

Some features only make sense in the standalone though. With the latest update we fixed a bug that prevented playback of and especially skipping around in a lot of video formats. A few more places interact with your local file-explorer/finder to get to the code of ops, the location of your patch or the directory containing that asset you are using.

Presentation mode

Most notable we added two new editor preferences that make the application open in fullscreen and another one to maximize the renderer on start. This way you can open cables standalone in "presentation mode" and have no one see your cables salad. Both of these states can also be set via command line options (`--fullscreen` and `--maximize-renderer`), or even using the new Ops.Ui.MaximizeRenderer op.

Op Dependencies

The JavaScript ecosystem gives us a lot of read-made, free and open-source libraries to integrate functionality into our ops and patches. This update revamps the way cables works with and loads libraries and opens up usage to a whole new set of things to use by supporting libraries packaged as ESM. All this can be managed from - you guessed it - the "Manage Op" tab. We even updated the documentation and provide some examples to work with Web Workers or WASM files.

Add dependencies

In the "Manage Op" tab you will find a new, improved section on adding, removing and managing op dependencies. You can upload library files, fetch them from a CDN (like cdnjs, jsdelivr or unpkg), load all the dependencies of another op or even add NPM packages in the standalone. Unsure how your library was packaged? The updated documentation gives you some guidelines on how to decide...or simply fall back to trial-and-error.

Manage dependencies

From the same place you can remove any library that is no longer needed, or download a previously uploaded file to maybe be used in another op or patch. The top of the "Manage Op" tab will also show a warning if your op is still using the old system of loading libraries, so does the op-page and the todos page of the team responsible for the op...if any. So revisit your ops that use external libraries and migrate to the new system.

New ops

HTML and CSS ops

While working on a client project we added some new operators to make it easier to create user interfaces using HTML and CSS that then drive the interaction of your patch. The combination of Ops.String.HandleBarsHtml and Ops.Html.QuerySelectorAll along with the some of the new ops makes it really easy to create rather complex interfaces using HTML and CCS in cables.

You can now add custom listeners to and array of elements, query their data attributes or currently attaches css classes and act on that, individually. Navigating the DOM with Ops.Html.ElementGetClosest and comparing with Ops.Html.ElementEquals gives a lot of power to this new workflow. Also check out Ops.Html.DraggableElement for an easy what to drag elements around using the mouse.

Various other Ops

Ops.Ui.VizImageUrl let's you show/debug images in your patch that are not a texture, like uploaded assets for URLs ourside cables. The Ops.Sidebar namespace has gotten two new members to add custom HTML and a date picker. Ops.Html.CanvasToBase64 let's you create a base64 string from any canvas, you could use Ops.Html.QuerySelector to get any external canvas and grab a screenshot from that with Ops.Gl.Textures.Base64ToTexture. Use Ops.Color.GradientColorArray and Ops.Color.ColorArraySort to create and work with color arrays and put in Ops.Gl.ShaderEffects.VertexArea to freely transform an area of you mesh.

Check out the examples of the ops by clicking on them!

Backups

When exporting your patch to be used in the standalone version you get all the operators, all the assets, all the libraries and everything else that is needed to run a patch. This also applies to cables' backup system. Your downloaded patches can be imported back into cables without interfering with the original patch. This gives you an easy, offline, offsite, local backup.

If you support us on Patreon cables does all of this for you, stores the backups on our servers and periodically creates automatic backups of your patches to let you sleep better. Check out the documentation on how that works.

Creating backups

A click on "create backup" in the editor will lead you through the process of creating a backup of your patch. Depending on wether or not you have storage space (left) in your supporter level this will let you pick a name for the backup or simply lead you to the patch-export tab for a download.

Get some space

Every cables supporter level comes with backup storage space on our servers. You can see and manage the backups (manual and automatic ones) from your MyData section on cables.gl.

Working with backups

In the editor or in the MyData section on cables.gl you will be able to see your currently used and free space. Via the context menu you can choose to restore a backup to a new patch, delete the backup to free up space, download it for offline backup or use in the standalone or mark any automatic backup to not be deleted with "keep this backup".

Automatic backups

For a deeper understanding on how this system, and especially the automatic backups, work we updated our documentation on imports and backups.

If you would like to have automatic backups of your cables.gl patches:

Support us on Patreon

New roadmap

The last roadmap we published is almost a year old, we crossed of a lot of the things that we had planned and we feel that we should set new goals for the closer future.

The items below give an overview on what we plan to do in the next few months. All of them are also tracked on our public issue tracker. Check out the roadmap and give feedback to steer us in the right direction! Or click individual topics you are interested in in the list below.

Editor

Supporting development

Focusing on cables development and implementing features on the above roadmap takes time and money. We are (again) super-proud to having been selected for another round of funding in the NGI Zero Commons Fund set up and managed by NLnet.

For a second time they are providing money and services that help keep us working on cables and giving this back to the (open-source) community. All of the items above are supported via our new project at NLNet.

If you have any means or ideas on how to financially support cables.gl development beyond a patreon membership, do not hesitate to contact us. There might also be other ways for you to give back to cables.gl and it's community.

These were only the cherry-picked items from the massive changelog of the last release. Check the details in the changelog itself, if you are interested.

Otherwise head over to the fresh and new cables.gl and start using all the latest and greatest!

In any case: give us feedback! Talk to us on social media, on discord or on GitHub.

best,

Team Cables

cables is brought to you by

If you want to see some special feature integrated into cables,

The following users helped to make this release possible by their membership on Patreon.

kikohs - thanks for your "Gold" membership

wirmachenbunt - thanks for your "Gold" membership

keepitvisual - thanks for your "Gold" membership

Thank you!

Support cables

Dynamic HTML generation using HandleBars Operator

Photo Slider Gallery

August 2024 Update

A new update to cables.gl, with new features, quality of life improvements and some bug fixes.

Read up on all the changes in the changelog, or continue reading to see how we improved working with HTML and CSS, how you can now manage and rename ops directly in the editor, and how you keep track of everything that might go wrong while patching.

Sounds interesting? Let's start...

HTML/CSS Workflow

HTML and CSS are the bread and butter of every web developer. Even when working in 3D-Space, you might end up using CSS, since that is what the browser is more used to.

We added Ops that make it easier to create CSS code - without actually writing it - and integrated HTML-Elements into some of the well known cables workflows.

HTML Overlay Mode

The Overlay you already know from 3D-Scenes, Models, Meshes will now show you, which HTML-Element you are currently working on.

Simply turn on "Overlays" by pressing "o" and select (for example) the new Element op that you want to find.

HTML Element Picking

You can also go the other way around: do you want to know which Op creates a certain HTML-Element on screen?

Press control and hover the element in question to highlight it. Clicking it will then take you to the Op that controls it.

Stay In The Editor

New Patch Outline

You will find the new Patch Outline when clicking on any empty space in your patch. It will show you a tree-view of your current patch, no matter how simple or complex it is. Click the icons to select the parts of the patch you are interested in.

Easy access to all the features available to structure your patches (areas, comments, colors, bookmarks, ...) should help everyone find what they are looking for in a breeze.

Rename Op

To keep you in "The Zone" while patching, you can now rename Ops from within the editor. No more opening another browser tab and then reloading the patch.

Use this new feature to rename your SubPatches right where you created them. You know you forgot what "SubPatch0" does, already...don't you?

Small Mistakes, Keep Control

To give everyone a bit more insight on what is actually happening "behind the scenes" - what might what actually does go wrong - we revisited error-handling in cables.gl and cables standalone.

This should help clarify which errors are critical, which ones are on the authors of the op, on the users of the op, or on us...

New Console

We created our own dev/error/info-console, so that not everything is hidden away in "dev tools", and to make it easier for you to take a look.

We are also revisiting what we deem an error. But for now and also in the future: if the console pops up, then something is broken, so please send a report 😉

...check out the changelog for more features, improvements and fixes.

Stay tuned for the upcoming new version of cables standalone!

Make sure you give us feedback! Talk to us on social media, on discord or on github discussions.

best,

Team Cables

cables is brought to you by

If you want to see some special feature integrated into cables,

The following users helped to make this release possible by their membership on Patreon.

matti - thanks for your "Platinum" membership

kikohs - thanks for your "Gold" membership

wirmachenbunt - thanks for your "Gold" membership

keepitvisual - thanks for your "Gold" membership

Thank you!

Support cables on Patreon

May 2024 Release

...spring took a bit longer to turn into summer (at least in Germany), so we extended our spring-cleaning session as well.

But, as always, the new release also comes with new features, improvements and changes. Read up on everything at a glance in the changelog, or continue reading for some hand-picked highlights in the following blog post.

Feel free to leave feedback, reports and further ideas on our issue tracker or on discord. Here we go...

Road to Open Source

The undev team is super proud that we found a partner to support us on the way to releasing cables.gl as fully open-source software.

The awesome people at the NLnet Foundation accepted our pitch and are now supporting us with budget and resources to finally work on an item we had on our road map for years.

Or as the people in Brussels would phrase it:

"This project was funded through the NGI0 Entrust Fund, a fund established by NLnet with financial support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet programme, under the aegis of DG Communications Networks, Content and Technology under grant agreement N^o 101069594."

Read more about what we have planned and will work on in the next few months and stay tuned for updates on the matter!

New Patreon Level For A Fiver

Starting in July 2023 we gave all of you the opportunity to support us on Patreon. And quite a few of you followed that call. Thank you!

Your support will get you early-access to new features in cables, announcements like this blog post and (depending on your membership-level) a few perks (like increased max upload size and more storage on our servers...just to mention a few). Up until we didn’t really enforce these limits, we just hinted that you are over your quota. As part of our next releases, we will slowly start enforcing any limits related to your membership-level.

To give our Patreon supporters a bit more bang for their bucks, we recently released a first, early-access version of "cables standalone" for Windows, Linux and Mac. It is currently available to all of our patrons for beta-testing and feedback.

Isn't that a reason to join the club?!

Do so, now! The new "Copper Level Support" will not only give you that nice warm feeling of supporting cables but also the benefits of one gigabyte of storage and 256 MB increased file upload size. You will also be among the first to know when we push out the next version of the standalone!

Support cables on Patreon

Hand Picked Goodies

Resizeable Ops

A feature that was requested pretty frequently finally made its way into the editor. You can start getting used to resizing ops by playing around with Sequence.

Use this feature to structure your patch, create visual anchors or just to get some more space between those ports.

We’d love some feedback on this before adding it to more ops. Let us know what you think!

Helper/Overlay System

Crossing off one of the items from our road map, this release will bring you a rework of the overlay and helper system.

The renderer will now show helpers for transformations and areas of influence by default.

You can toggle them on and off by pressing "o", if you need a clear view of the renderer. This will definitely be improved in the future, to give even more overview and orientation.

VizString

Small change, but a really useful one! VizString now will wrap your long, long strings into its own area to give you a full overview.

You can also choose to visualize non-printables like whitespace, tab, line breaks… pretty useful for debugging.

Know What's Up

Your cables homepage got another update as well. Next to your activity feed, you will see events that circle around cables.

These can be meetups on discord, chances to "meet the makers", workshops, upcoming releases or maybe even your event... feel free to contact us if you want to promote your event there!

While we hope that summer will finally come, this (and more) should keep you busy for a bit.

Make sure you give us feedback! Talk to us on social media, on discord or on github discussions.

best,

Team Cables

cables is brought to you by

If you want to see some special feature integrated into cables,

The following users helped to make this release possible by their membership on Patreon.

matti - thanks for your "Platinum" membership

kikohs - thanks for your "Gold" membership

wirmachenbunt - thanks for your "Gold" membership

keepitvisual - thanks for your "Gold" membership

Thank you!

Support cables on Patreon

April 2024 Release

They say "Cleaning is a practice, not a project" - well, call it whatever you want. But after the last release gave you all the power to "code" your own without even touching code, this one will make things faster, cleaner and easier.

As always you will find a comprehensive list of the errands we ran in the changelog, and some cherry-picked items in the post below...

Changes To The Editor

Smooth Operators

The editor now provides a completely fresh and smooth experience when you deactivate "snap to grid" in your editor preferences.

Now, the movement of ops is much smoother and they snap to every position that "makes sense". This can be the edges of other ops but most of the time it will try to get your cables straight by aligning them to connected ports. Give it a try!

If you quickly need the grid back, you can always press control to snap your dragged op to the grid.

Visible Math

All ops doing simple math will now automatically show their expression right on the op.

Having your Sum op say "1 + X" is a super convenient way to see which "hard coded" values you used for tweaking your transforms or animations.

Editing Of Assets

It is now possible to edit uploaded text files directly in the editor. No need to download and upload the same file over and over again to edit JSON, HTML or simple text files.

After you have made changes to your file, any ops using the content will update immediately.

This pairs especially well with the new handlebars op.

Website Improvements

A New Home

While reworking the whole code base of the website-part of cables.gl, we also took the time to restructure the homepage a bit.

When logging in or coming back to cables, the first thing you will now see is your activityfeed with the latest entries, alongside the latest videos, featured patches and discussions on github. Find your invites, requests, likes and activities of people you are following at first glance! And on top of that, the activityfeed will now include a notification whenever someone added a patch to a team that you are a member of - that means even less clicks to collaborating on projects.

As part of a few smaller changes, we made your "My Data" load faster, added some pagination for storage information and separated your ops into tabs for patches, users, teams, extensions, ... It should be a lot easier to find “that one op you were working on last week" again.

If you are into coding ops, we followed a suggestion coming from github: you can now have a licence attached to ops you wrote. Mention the licence you share your op with while editing the rest of the documentation. This defaults to the "MIT-License", but feel free to put anything in there. This list might be a good starting point to find an identifier, though.

For your own spring cleaning session you can now choose to "leave project" on the patch page once your collaboration is finished- to keep "My Patches" clean and tidy.

In case you want to get some help from the community and are unsure on how to best share a patch for feedback, we added a small guide to the FAQ section of our docs.

Some New Ops

Control Blending

As an addition to the existing simple blendmode operator, the new GlBlendFunc op gives you full control to use all combinations of OpenGL blend equations.

Editing Positions

Are you annoyed by typing in coordinates or importing 3D scenes to extract points? Now you can simply edit them by moving objects with your mouse and fill up an array.

Array3PointEditor allows for quick position adjustments of objects or points using the well-known helper gizmo.

In the future this will be improved to feature scaling, rotation and more....

Scene Switching

One of the most asked questions we get is how to easily create transitions between scenes.

We already have RouteTrigger to switch between scenes in a hard way. The new RouteTriggerAnimated adds animation capabilities to it, so you can easily cross fade your scenes now!

Since this is a SubPatchOp you can clone it and easily make adjustments to it to serve your very personal requirements. Without having to write any code!

Going Outside

While we were working on increasing server performance, allowing for releases without any downtime (did you notice?), we also added more projects to "made with cables". Check them out to see what people are using cables for in commercial or artsy projects and even for teaching purposes.

Especially worth mentioning here is a new platform created by cables users kikohs and bagoof. They started "decode.gl" and published videos on more than 20 topics, to get you started at different levels of cables. You will find them on their website, or directly on YouTube.

To give you a small teaser, here is the introduction:

...definitely check it out!

And for your calendars: Every first Wednesday of the month we host a meetup on discord. Join us to keep updated and share your creations!

Make sure you give us feedback! Talk to us on social media, on discord or on github discussions.

best,

Team Cables

cables is brought to you by

If you want to see some special feature integrated into cables,

The following users helped to make this release possible by their membership on patreon.

kikohs - thanks for your "Gold" membership

wirmachenbunt - thanks for your "Gold" membership

Thank you!

Visit cables on Patreon

February 2024 Release

The first release of the new year goes out with a bang!

If you want a real quick look at all the changes: head over to the changelog directly. But don't, you will be missing out on a lot of the fun.

Have you ever felt the need to share SubPatches? Now you can! Have you never been keen on learning to code but still wanted to create Ops? Now's your chance!

Are you sitting in a dimly lit area and need the editor to be just a bit brighter? Tweak it now! Is your display too small to handle both editing AND rendering? Pop it out, now!

Read up on all the new additions that come with this release below. Have fun!

Patching Your Own Ops

How about killing two (or maybe even a whole flock) of birds with one stone?!

For a long time there have been plenty of feature-requests, bug-reports and general nuisances with SubPatches in cables.gl. We didn't feel like fixing them, we’ve given our SubPatches a complete overhaul!

SubPatches are now fully-fledged, "first class" Ops that you can create, reuse within and across projects, and share with your team or the entire community. Check out the example for the new ComposingGridOverlay-op. See how the Op has a thin, grey border? Double click and jump right in to see what other ops it is composed of. Clone it, tweak it, use it in your own projects.

No more copies and different versions of subpatches in one patch, no more copy-pasting functionality that you reuse in different patches of the same project!

All the features that come with "normal" Ops are immediately available to SubPatches as well, now. Document them, create example patches, see how they are used, share, collaborate, rename, clone, create new versions, you name it...

Getting Started

To get you started with creating your own Ops, from Ops, you can click on "Patch a new op" in the Editor-Menu, or mark some ops and pick "Create Op From Selection".

Depending on the context you are in, cables will automatically create an op for your from your selection, pick a name and open the editor. You know this from somewhere, right?

Clicking on "Manage Op" of a newly generated SubPatchOp will open the new port editor...

Creating Ports

...from where you will be able to create new ports for your Op. These ports can be named anything and have all the basic types for ports that are provided by cables.

Pick wisely, as this will be the outside interface of your Op. All the ports will be available on the inside of your SubPatch for you to work with. Make sure to connect all the exposed outputs, so people can work with the results of your patching.

Feel fine with all the ports but made a mistake? Wrong order? Wrong name? Did cables autogenerate to your dislike? Edit them...

Pushing Things Into Place

Once you enter the "Manage Op"-Tab of a SubPatch-Op, you can reorder ports, rename them or, as with any other op, clone, rename and document the op.

Moving around ports will reflect immediately in the patch field, this way you can fiddle around with order and names until you like it. Hint: most of the time you want the triggers (in and out) on the far left, so your ops snap in easily when dragged into the MainLoop.

Pushing The Limits

All the people that already support cables.gl on Patreon will love this! We used to limit upload sizes for files to 100 MB. A reasonable size that let everyone upload images, models and audiofiles but also kept our storage-costs at bay.

With the rise of things like Gaussian Splatting, HDR-Images, Multichannel-Audio and, last but not least, AI-Models things start to take up a bit more space. We got you covered for the future!

We now link these "limits" to you support-level on Patreon (or some special memberships for contributing code to cables directly). So if you really need more space or have to upload bigger files, simply chip in to one of the sponsorship-levels on Patreon, link your Patreon-Account to cables and immediately take advantage of your new freedom.

To see what we think are reasonable limits, we added some stats, a list of your current usage of storage and exports and your current memberships on cables.gl to "My Data" in your account section. Some of the memberships (like the Patreon Level and a Contributor Badge) will also show up publicly on your user profile. Your claim to fame!

Support cables on Patreon

Changes To The Editor

PopOut Canvas

We started this journey with ExternalCanvas in the last release. This update will give you the power of "multi-screen-patching" in the editor.

Click the new "pop out" icon below the renderer and have your render window seperated from your patching window. This (different from ExternalCanvas) will also display any HTML-Elements you added to your patch, and update them accordingly.

Want to test your patch in portrait-mode? Working on responsive layouts? Need to test on retina? Fiddling around with external touch displays? Just pop out the renderer, patch on one screen, render on another!

All The Colors

The colors in the cables-editor got a fresh new breeze. All the Ops are now also visually sorted into their respective namespaces.

You will recognize by the color of the op which type of data they are working with and what family of ops they belong to.

These colors also are reflected in links, ports, the opselect and even the reworked op-page on the website. Getting a quick grasp on wtf is going on in a patch is now a lot easier on the eyes.

Customize It

All these colors come from a "theme". And what's the best tool to use when creating a theme for the cables editor? Exactly: cables.

See the patches in this patchlist, clone them, tweak your own colors and store them in your browsers storage to use them in all your patches.

Made something nice? Winter-Theme? Summer-Theme? Paper-Theme? Share them with us via Discord, and we'll put them in the patchlist.

Keeping Context

Data flows. Where from? Where to? Sometimes it's not easy to tell.

Cables will now highlight all the relevant parts of any connection for you. Once you click any Op, it's connections become highlighted.

Once you hover any cable, it will also highlight and illuminate the ports that it starts and ends at.

If you are not using intercontinental cables across your patch, this will show you where your data goes at a single glance...

Slowly Fade Away

...and if you indeed ARE using intercontinental cables...we also have something new for you.

Any connection between two ops that reaches a certain length will now "fade out" in the middle to make way for other crossing cables or ops that are in the way.

Hovering the link, or clicking any connected op, will show you the cables at full glance again.

Never again feel bad about all those overlapping cables! At least they are now hidden under the carpet.

Ops To The Rescue

Below is a short list of new ops that come with this release. As mentioned above, take a closer look at ComposingGridOverlay, as it is the first Op in the core of cables that is made entirely of other ops. More to come!

If you are still into coding ops, for whatever reason. We also tweaked the "Op Rescue Editor" for your. With this simple text editor outside of the cables editor you can easily recover from most of the mistakes you made when writing Ops or shaders. We added text editors for attachments, formating code and fine tuned the looks a bit. How do you get there? Oh...didn't we tell you that there is a new page that lists all Ops that where created by you? Head over there, pick any Op, scroll down on the op-page and press the edit button...or simply click on the link in the error-modal that will pop up if you screwed up too hard 😉

Anyhow, check these out...

...and we thought this would be a small release. Well then, here we are.

Make sure you give us feedback! Talk to us on social media, on discord or on github discussions.

For your calendars: The next cables meetup will take place on February 14th (20:00 CET). Check the event on discord to keep up to date with speakers and topics!

best,

Team Cables

cables is brought to you by

If you want to see some special feature integrated into cables,

The following users helped to make this release possible by their membership on patreon.

kikohs - thanks for your "Gold" membership

wirmachenbunt - thanks for your "Gold" membership

Thank you!

Visit cables on Patreon

Using cables in the classroom

While trying out a new creative tool for yourself is fairly easy, deciding on the right platform to introduce to your students as a teacher or professor is probably a bit more of a serious task. First and foremost, your platform of choice will need to be easily accessible to all of your students. But you will also want to make sure it is easy to learn, and provides enough material to empower self-paced progression.

Running fully in the browser, free of charge, and with tons of published projects to learn from, we believe cables is the perfect visual programming platform to use in the classroom. And we are excited to see that more and more universities around the world are starting to use cables. Digital Art, Web, Graphic and Motion Design, UX, Digital Humanities - the range of areas students are coming from is impressive, and so is the variety of projects they have been creating using cables.

We wanted to learn more about how people are using cables to teach creative coding. So we reached out to some of our dearest community members who work in education. Let’s hear their take on introducing new tools to their students, and how that is going with cables specifically. By the way, they didn’t get paid for any of what they said 🙂

Please meet…

Kathi Mayrhofer (kathl)

Spatial experience developer at Austria based ‘responsive spaces’.

Teaches Design Technology Tools at Linz Art University in the Media Institute, and Generative and Interactive Art at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg.

Kathi has been teaching in the field of interactive, generative projects, project support and tools since 2008, and her passion is the connection between code and design (in class). Professionally she has been working independently since 2008, and is now in a permanent position working on interactive, immersive room installations.

Alberto Barrios (n4hui)

Digital artist from Mexico City.
Teaches Art, Digital Media, Video Games and Educational WEB Platforms at the Autonomous University of México.

Alberto is a passionate creator of interactive audiovisual experiences, such as art installations in the real world or web apps. He also uses his art and projects to promote native Mexican language and culture. Visit his website to see an example of his work with cables, teaching Mexican native language with interactive content.

Christian Engler (wirmachenbunt)

Based in Hamburg, teaches interactive media at Muthesius University, using cables and Unity3D.

Chris is running wirmachenbunt, a design studio creating and developing interactive experiences for commercial use.

Bérenger Recoules (b2renger)

Head of digital workshop at L'école de design Nantes Atlantique in France.
Teaches digital and media design master's students, as well as ux, graphic and motion design bachelor students.

Bérenger has a background in engineering, musicology and cognitive sciences. He worked as a composer, taught himself how to code and was a media artist before starting his position at the university. He provides support for teaching, helps students throughout their projects, and teaches them as well, working with anything that is digital or new media, for example audiovisual, code, electronics, and digital fabrication.

Dr Kirell Benzi (kikohs)

Data artist, Senior applied scientist at EPFL university in Switzerland, teaching courses such as cultural data sculpting (Masters in digital humanities) and Motion Design (Creative Technologist).

Kirell is an impressive data artist working, as well as teaching at one of the world class universities in Switzerland. He creates data-driven art pieces and works mostly with data and machine learning. Visit his website to learn more about his projects.

Auditory experience generating a soundscape

… and here is what they said:

How did you get into cables yourself, and then into using it in your classroom?

Kathi: “I use cables to quickly try out ideas for interfaces and communication tools. I focus on vvvv, but I wanted to give my students the opportunity to learn another tool besides that. I find it incredibly helpful that there are so many online tutorials available, which makes self-study a lot easier! I often work with students who are in the field of design/programming/concept, and as cables is a browser solution, it's easy for them to get started, no matter if they are on mac or windows.”

Alberto: “I searched for an alternative to vvvv without luck, when suddenly a video of cables appeared in my youtube. I went to the page and with my experience using vvvv and the video tutorials I learned fast, it was a dream come true, cables is my favourite app since then. I was using vvvv and vvvv.js with my students of digital art so it was natural to start to use cables and more because it is free, no need to install it, just the browser, so it is perfect for school.”

Bérenger: “I got into cables thanks to the covid pandemic. Basically I did a lot of courses online on discord about new tools and technologies when we had some gaps in our schedules because of sick teachers or other technical reasons. Cables was one of them 🙂 I followed the byte size tutorial playlist, and a few days later I made the first introduction classes about cables. It was really awesome because of the search engine and the exhaustive documentation. Even if it can get hard (because we do advanced 3D in the browser ...) it really empowers students to search by themselves.

With everything that went in cables I can really bridge the gaps between technologies: I can do mqtt with esp32 and build interfaces to control them, use arduino to build tangible interfaces (recognisable as midi devices or gamepads), include 3D models, manipulate them and display them in VR with no setup needed. I can also do interaction design with the webcam and the media pipe ops (as well as teachable machines) - and all that with beginners. I think it has the potential to be the fastest prototyping tool for almost every use.”

Kirell: “I have been using cables for almost 3 years now. Found it by accident by looking at realtime alternatives to Houdini on the web. It is a great tool for teaching because it has a short learning curve to get started yet is powerful enough to create impressive projects.”

Chris: “After teaching vvvv for almost 15 years, i switched to cables because it is so much more accessible and visually appealing to artists and designers. Cables is a clear winner for the classroom since it doesn't need any special hardware, runs almost everywhere, since it is browser based. Students don't have to tackle any installation madness or licensing issues. You just register and off you go. I personally love the startup speed, just open the browser and I can sketch whatever I like. Most other tools take some time to even start or setup, which kills the flow. I totally love the teams feature. It is a beautiful way to collect student sketches and let everyone learn from the collective. While also giving me the ability to directly help students without the hassle of sending project files. Since i use and teach vvvv, Unity3D and Unreal, i can say cables is definitely the easiest one, to get into realtime graphics and creative coding.”

What’s your typical approach to getting your students started with cables?

Kathi: “I always show motivating projects, discussing them together to show that everything is possible if you approach it in small steps. Students need to see that they can find a lot of help online, and in addition to that I always write down all the ops that we look at and put up a link list so they can read more in their own time easily.”

Alberto: “From the beginning to celebrate the Mexican "day of the death" and 3D tours of the schools to help new students. Also when teaching Web Design I show them how to make things with html, css and java script but in cables, and I also teach how to make video games.”

Bérenger: “I do a few introductory classes to let students know that the tool is here and what it can do. Often the first half hour is about building a cube and controlling its size with your hand through a media pipe - it's always a big success to be able to make this kind of thing so fast with beginners. And then we customise aspects with a sidebar, go into compositing and displacement maps and make all that react with audio. After that we do a lot of 3D with gltf files, shadows, physics etc. If we have time I do a bit of html/css and sometimes coding.”

Chris: “The documentation is very helpful to get started. What stands out is the ability to inspect every published patch, enabling you to learn from others. It's dead simple to share your projects to collaborate or seek help. And let's not forget the hybrid character of cables. It's not just a patching environment, but invites you to code your own javascript ops. Again, it is very easy to get into op coding since every op code can be looked at, hence you can start alternating other people's code and learn from it. I typically start by showing my professional projects, making demo patches for every class, showing works of former cables students, and surfing through the best of the best patches on the cables website.”

Kirell: “I quickly show how easy it is to use instancing and start building small time driven particles movement. We generally need 5 or 6 hours to cover most of the aspects of the tool and then we switch to personalised help for students’ projects every week for 8 weeks.”

What do your students typically work on with cables?

Kathi: “At Kunstuniversität Linz my students are taking their first steps in graphical surfaces, aiming at transforming data and numbers into visual language, creating data based patches, and querying sound or APIs. Topics at FH Hakenberg are computer graphics (know your roots), generative patterns, animation-based 3d world, pointclouds + data, and sound-reactive experience. I do many, many small exercises, and the more diverse the group, the more open the tasks. It is important to make sure that everyone is able to meet the minimum requirement of a deliverable. I also always share the patch of the hour.”

Bérenger: “The first class was about making an interactive poster with graphic designers - it was only 4 sessions of 3 hours but the students did some pretty nice work. We will soon use cables on a project called Oceans to do some museography installations with our digital master and we are preparing a very exciting workshop about interactive narration with our second year students from our ux and game bachelor program!”

Chris: “Students come from Industrial / Interface Design, Communication Design and Architecture, therefore the application of cables varies a lot. We work on interactive data visualizations, product presentations, generative art and large spatial installations with physical inputs. And probably much more categories since cables is a blank canvas which can be used in many ways. One focus is definitely the use of cables outside of the web realm, using cables in combination with physical computing, all sorts of sensors to transform spaces and create exciting exhibitions.“

Alberto: “I use cables with my students mainly in team work, so they are part of the process making suggestions, materials or tweaking already done patches. I am currently making a modular course in Spanish to teach the basics, how to make 3D tours, web pages and digital art based on my artworks. I also did some YouTube tutorials and soon that will be updated.”

Kirell: “I’ve used it in the classroom for designers and engineers at master level. It is a very good tool to create interactive experiences on the web. Most of the grade was on a personal individual project made with cables.”

How is it going for your students, did you get any feedback from them?

Kathi: “The course is still running, so I only have little feedback, but it looks like they're really enjoying it at the moment. From what I have seen so far, I think I’ll just reduce the pace a bit next time.”

Chris: “The feedback I get is pretty good. But with every development environment, you need to practise a lot, no matter how easy the software is. In order to get your ideas into a patch, you need to know the language. I can guide the students only so far, offer them 1 to 1 help, discuss their projects in the class, analyse real applications of cables... but in the end, students need a strong interest in real time graphics and 3D.”

Bérenger: ”Students are really impressed by the UX and the flow you can get in this environment. Passing a patch in VR mode is always impressive for students because it's so simple. The documentation is a big aspect to empower them - I can teach them how to explore the docs and how to use the amazing search engine (by categories etc.), so they are more independent before even facing any issue. The collaborative aspects, remote control and export modes (video / image / code download and exe building) make them really confident in being able to produce something useful for any projects. And for many of my students the timeline is also something reassuring.”

Kirell: ”Students are thrilled to get started and happy to quickly see results.”

If you too are using cables in classrooms, workshops, at hackerspaces or anywhere else to teach people, sure let us know! Share your experience on social media or discord.

Thanks so much to everyone who contributed to this article by sharing their teaching experience! We are looking forward to seeing more of what you are doing in your classrooms!

best,

Team Cables

November 2023 Release

Coding ops and working together on projects or in teams is an important part of the cables community. Therefore, making it easier to find out what's going on in your teams and patches, without breaking your flow of working, has been long overdue.

Read on here or visit our changelog to find out how that works, and what else we’ve got for you in this update.

But Before We Start…

We would like to thank everyone who chimed in to support us via Patreon so far!

Your paid memberships already provide enough budget to cover server costs and the monthly discord "boosts". This means a lot! Up until now, we had to stem this purely through undev, our small, two dude company behind cables.

If you enjoy using cables, please consider supporting us as well. Patreon is now offering annual memberships as well, with a 10% discount!

Support cables on Patreon

Activityfeed

Lots of patches, collaborators and teams working on different projects or ops, and public patches collecting likes and comments. That’s a lot, and it was a little hard to keep track of what needs doing, and what else is happening in the cables community.

With this release we are introducing the Activityfeed. This is the one place where cables will notify you about actions required, likes to your patches and comments left for you.

If people are requesting access to your patches or teams, simply find a note on the Activityfeed, click the red bubble on the website or in the editor, and act on these right away.

Go check it out. The last 30 days of activity on your feed have been pre-filled by us...

Notification Settings

To flag even more what needs your attention (access requests, invites, ...) you can now set how to get notified.

Get an email (as you used to), get a small hint in the editor when you are currently working on a patch, or register different devices to receive push-notifications.

Try registering your mobile phone for really quick reactions on access requests and invites by people you are working with.

All these are for "action items" only, keeping the signal-to-noise ratio in check, even with large teams and collaboration projects.

Editor Changes

Texture Preview

We’ve updated the texture preview in the editor to allow for quick rescaling of the preview image. Along with the VizTexture-Op this gives you a nice, quick way to see the outputs of your different render- or post processing stages.

Did you know you can also make it stick open?

Color Indicators

To give you more visual feedback on the state of your patch, we added an indicator for the color that is set on basically any Op that works with RGB inputs.

This works even when animated and provides a quick overview of all the colors that make up your patch.

Color Schemes

Using the ColorScheme op you can now act on a scheme that's set in the browser or device.

Create dark- and light-themed versions of your patch by querying the preferred settings of your users.

Manage Op Code

There is room for parameters now! To save you from clicking back and forth while working on ops, we moved the tabs below the renderer to the "three dots menu" of the op.

Select "Manage Op Code" to open up a new editor tab with all the functionality you need for your ops work. Add libraries, clone or rename the op, work on attachments...you name it.

You can now also select all of this with a simple click in the top of the code-editor tab.

More Neat Things

Unlisted - View Only

We implemented the concept of "patch visibility" in the last release, and removed the "secret url" while we were at it. But we heard your feedback, so now we are introducing the "Unlisted View-Only" mode mode option. Share patches with the community or your clients, but keep your cables magic to yourself.

PBR Material Revisited

Thanks to amajesticseaflapflap for revisiting PBRMaterial and adding more "clear coat" options and "thin film iridescence" for everyone to use!

You can now finally coat your automotive models in a metallic look and put some oily, shiny puddles underneath.

Patch Page Improvements

On the patch page, collaborators will now find all your used User-Ops and Team-Ops along with all the Patch-Ops that belong to the patch.

Time to clean up before you publish your patch!

With the right permissions, you will also be able to access the settings or export the project directly.

Faster Loading And Saving

Thanks to the support through Patreon, we were able to revisit our server-infrastructure and optimize it significantly. And while we had our eyes on loading and saving speed, we went through a lot of pages on cables.gl to reduce loading time, waiting for saving (i.e. in the editor), the size of requests by removing unneeded data and a lot more… You should notice that immediately. Sorry, less coffee breaks for you!

Ops

A few new ops also appear in this release, check them out in the changelog, or individually

...that concludes the November 2023 Release.

Make sure you give us feedback! Talk to us on social media, on discord or on github discussions.

For your calendars: The next cables meetup will take place on December 13th (20:00 CET). Check the event on discord to keep up to date with speakers and topics!

best,

Team Cables

cables is brought to you by

If you want to see some special feature integrated into cables,

The following users helped to make this release possible by their membership on patreon.

kikohs - thanks for your "Gold" membership

wirmachenbunt - thanks for your "Gold" membership

Thank you!

Visit cables on Patreon

September 2023 Release

Hello Everyone,

after handing out the roadmap for what's to come last time, we are back again with a new release of cables.gl.

Head over to the changelog to see all the changes one-by-one, but read on to get a rundown of some highlights.

You will find that we improved the workflow of collaboration even more, give you some nifty tools for VJing, let you organize your favourite patches and make you animate your 3D models even easier. And that's not even all of it!

External Canvas

Cables already has the means to edit patches and view on other devices or windows in near real-time for quite some while. This needed a networking connection, proper setup of credentials and still comes with a few drawbacks, though.

With the "ExternalCanvas" op, most of these are a thing of the past. Patch live - in a club of your choice - project to different displays, test on second monitor...

VJing with cables

Open your patch, add the ExternalCanvas op, put it somewhere into your MainLoop and click "Open Window". Pick different names, if you need multiple windows.

Tweak some parameters and see things update in real-real-time.

Shape Keys

GltfScene now has better support for morph targets and shape keys (weighted morph targets) or vertex animations.

This makes it possible to - for example - create unique generative animations of predefined shape states - or simply export complex vertex animations that were created in an external tool without skinning or rigging.

Visible Patches

To improve the workflow of finding, remembering and working on patches we are adding patchlists to the mix of options to collect a bunch of patches together.

Patchlists integrate nicely with all the other "lists" in cables, be it teams, collaborators, featured patches, ...

Patchlists

Adding a patch to a list - or managing which of your lists the patch appears on - can be done right on the patchpage.

Via the new "Patchlists" option in the "My Patches" navigation you can create new lists, make them private or keep them as "unlisted". If go for "public" visibility, the list will be shown to everyone.

Share your favourite patches containing cubes, best practices, curated demos, ...

Good-Bye Secret URL

The new way of deciding on visibility of everything finally made it's way to patches themselves.

Gone are the days of creating, finding and copy-pasting a secret URL to share a patch with certain people. Just put your patch on "unlisted" and share the URL.

Patch Summary

All of this now integrated nicely into the new patch summary and a refined patch-page. Find the teams and lists a patch is related to right where they belong. The new patch summary in the editor also gives you a bit more space.

Click any free space on the background of the editor to check it out!

Working With The Editor

Working on the releases also involves a lot of patching. Sometimes we stumble across something that could improve the general "quality of life" when working with the cables editor. Here is what we found this time:

Math

What started as an idea on github - and already made its way into the last releases - finally made us go all the way and make adding math to your patches way easier.

Press "Esc", type "/100", press "Enter" and you just added a Divide op that already divides by 100...check all the other ones, as well!