For the past several months now, i've been heavily using leo at work
to manage my project files and for developing tools and scripts. I
love the way that i'm able to organize all my work scripts and tools.
Also tinkered a bit with leo's code to hack some workarounds to fit
leo into my  workflow. This has lead me to think of ideas/wishlist for
leo that i think will be useful to me and hopefully to others. I have
recently browsed the forums after a long time and seems like its a
good time to post these ideas of mine and get feedback.

I am a vfx artist and technical director and my work involves creating
3D computer graphics content. I also do a lot of scripting and tools
creation. Leo will be really useful to me and probably to others who
are not strictly only programmers if leo will provide  extensive,
first-class support to other data types beside text such as movie,
html, and rich text data and maybe even 3D geometry data! :)

Anyway, ive got some ideas on how it can be made. And depending on
available free time, i might take a stab at it myself. My  ideas stem
from my experiences using highend 3D/2D computer graphics software, a
lot of which have a node-based DAG architecture kinda like leo. These
apps define various types of node for various data types such as
polygon data, animation data, even a text node that can contain
artist's notes. They also provide several viewers/editors for
interacting to each nodetype. So there's an editor for viewing/editing
polygon mesh data, materials editor for editing materials nodes, an
attribute editor for changing node attributes, etc. They even provide
an outliner editor as one way of viewing and editing all the nodes.

I would like to implement something similar in leo. My idea is to
define nodetypes for each type of data that leo will support. These
nodetypes will be derived from a base leo node. These nodes can also
be subclassed to create variations in the data types. So we can have a
text nodetype for plain text, an html nodetype to handle html data,
movie nodetype for dealing with quicktime, mpeg data, a code nodetype
for writing code, etc. The code and html nodetypes can subclass from
the text nodetype since they all deal with textual data. Several types
of editors/viewers can be created and each one associated with
nodetypes that it can handle. An external editor/viewer can also be
defined via settings. So e.g. movie nodetypes can be associated with
vlc player. For each nodetype, several attributes can be exposed and
made editable via an attribute editor. Kinda like the current uA
setup. New nodes can be created via plugins which might include a
custom viewer if existing viewers/editors are not able to handle the
data it represents. With regard to directives, each nodetype will
support only the directives applicable to its data. E.g. @file and
@shadow can only be applicable to code nodetype and not movie. So
existing leo functionality with regard to organizing code is still
maintained.

Anyway, my free time is up so I have to stop here. But there are more
ideas brewing in my head. Just got to get this thing out to get
feedback from the regulars here. I'll post some more details when i've
got the time.

Regards,
Eric

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