walking through Shadow: visualize parameter space

[cben]

a UX/DX idea inspired by some comments on instant feedback here, by NodeBox saying:

Every parameter in NodeBox can be animated. Animations can be exported as common movie formats or as a sequence of images.

and by the "walking" mechanic of Amber:

When applying some effect to a picture, instead of asking user to fix a parameter up-front, vary the parameter across the picture so user can see / move through the parameter space.
Better yet, pretend the varying parameter is a "pane of frosted glass" laid over the input image and let user slide it around ↔️✋↕️.

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For this project, after I move to picture-as-stack-element:

• If I add a "toolbox" of actions that can be inserted, instead of inserting a black-box word like dark, insert e.g. <0-1> multiply where <0-1> is a special word that (A) returns an image varying (as simple gradient, or perlin noise?) 0 to 1 that (B) "sticks" to mouse movements and (C) upon mouse click replaces itself with the chosen value.

  (B) is easy to build on top of mouse-sensing words like mx, my in Forth Haiku Salon.

  (C) is crossover with https://github.com/cben/model-view-self-modify which I want to explore anyway 😜

• Or maybe do insert dark but let user easily see its definition (function editor #10) of 0.5 multiply, and whenever cursor is on a literal number, allow "scrubbing" it by temporarily changing to mouse-draggable gradient as above. So really the whole thing is a refinement on scrubbing where I take advantage of whole-image opportunity to present a range of outcomes at once. 💡

  • Needs clear separate affordances for editing original transcluded definition (as I wanted in function editor #10), vs. "forking" it by inlining.

Either way, this also teaches user any parameter need not be uniform, they could feed in a varying image.