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Comment by reubano | Hacker News Reader

Have you investigated any of the existing GUIs? [1-3] I'd love to hear your thoughts on their pros/cons. I do plan to integrate a nice GUI framework if I can find one.

[1] https://azkaban.github.io/ [2] https://developers.google.com/blockly/ [3] http://nodered.org/

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Node-RED is pretty great. I think a wiring interface is a better choice than a block-level thing like blockly.

True, Node-RED is much more aligned to the original Yahoo! Pipes interface. I kinda like the scratch/blockly interface since you can make it clear which components can go where. Plus it's reminiscent of physical Lego blocks.

Which interface do you think is more newbie friendly? My gut says blocks (maybe something a bit more simple/refined than blocky) are easier to grok, while wires allow for designing more complex workflows.

I don't feel like blocks really maps well to the kinds of tasks i'd do in node-red and yahoo pipes, and presumably riko (I didn't dive too deep here yet though). a wiring interface better reflects the idea of inputs, filters, and outputs, and wiring them up in flexible ways. blocks seems a little rigid and more variable/iteration/function-based.

maybe figure out a few common workflows that people would make in riko or node-red, and mock up how they'd work/look in blocks vs. wiring/pipes.

> maybe figure out a few common workflows that people would make in riko or node-red, and mock up how they'd work/look in blocks vs. wiring/pipes.

Good idea, what are your workflows?

I think the wiring is a good way to show the connections, white space is needed to keep things readable so it allows for gaps and logical groupings, wires, strings, I think the analogy is fairly digestible to someone new to this. Thanks for everyone's input, I'll be taking a look.

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