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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

If your biggest complaint is a relatively minor UX improvement then they're crushing it!!!

TBH, that's about the most shallow, surface level feedback that could possibly be given. This project is providing a pretty radically different paradigm for image editing. Is that a good paradigm? Is it useful? Does it allow novices and/or experts to do work faster? Are there things it can't do? What would it take to do those things? Does it need new nodes types? More options on existing nodes?

I don't know the answer. TBH it's a pretty hard sell. Either it works or it doesn't. A missing feature in the node editor is not in the Top 1000 most important things.

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If your app slows down the user by having to make repetitive tasks because your UX is lacking, then there's a whole lot of no responses to your questions. Not really sure how that's hard to comprehend. Eliminating repetitive tasks is why we invented computers. Using a computer to create a new method of repetitive tasks is not good use of those computers or the user's time.

It's like the first gens of iOS that did not allow for copy&paste. Was that a shallow bit of feedback? No, because it's some of the most basic functionality a user would expect to be there. If iOS and no copy&paste was released in the 1980s, it might have been forgiven. Since it was released in 2007 after anyone using computing had seen/used copy&paste and the competing product did have that functionality, it was a huge slight against it. Was copy&paste the core functionality? Probably not, but it was a huge hindrance.

After getting past the fact this is node based editing, it's pretty much an image editor after that. Again, if anything you try to implement is less than pre-existing software, what's the point. So, when you present an application that is supposed to be paradigm shifting, you better be backing it up. Again, don't want public comments, don't post the software to public forum created solely for public commenting.

There’s an obvious difference between “save two easy clicks” (node graph) and “save dozens to hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of awkward taps” (iOS copy/paste).

If you think this feedback is genuinely helpful and valuable that’s cool. All I can say is yikes.

It's "two" clicks on a very simple node network: if you look at some of the > 1000-10k node networks used in VFX for things like compositing/image editing and see artists re-arrange networks, it all adds up cumulatively, and having a fluid and efficient workflow is critical.

Have you ever used a node based editor? You don't just make a single node. For every edit you do, you make a node. Resize? new node. Adjust RAW settings? new node. Isolate color to make a mask? new node. Apply blur? new node. I just don't know how you can sit there and say that you won't do this thousands of time in a session of image editing and be expected to be taken seriously.

If you can't drag-n-drop the node into a different order, that's also bad. why? It's just one of the advantages of node based editing, and part of that is the ability to quickly disconnect/reconnect/re-order the nodes. That's part of the UX that should be in first public releases. At the end of the day, you can skin something like ImageMagick to have a node based UI/UX and solve the majority of the things you seem to think are important as a first release. If you're releasing a node based image editor, I want to see how the nodes behave.

I've used many different node editors. I've even built some! I just double-checked and Unreal Engine's node editors do NOT support inserting a node into an existing link. Take from that what you will.

As much as I don't want to pile on complaints about UI ergonomics on what's clearly a pre-MVP alpha proof-of-concept (and which, IMO, has great potential) - since you brought up Unreal Engine, I feel compelled to agree with your parent poster here: even for casual user like me, the UE node editor (both in Blueprints and shaders) is the limiting factor in development/iteration/thinking speed. I love the hands-on, immediate, bullshit-free approach and discoverability the UE Blueprints offer, but from the first minute of playing with them, I found myself wanting to go back to code, because of all the low-level manual dragging and dropping involved. UE is a legitimate target to complain about, because it's been production-ready and sold for good money for a long time now.

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