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Comment by forrestthewoods | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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