As Isaac Newton said, “I stand on the shoulders of giants”.
No, I’m not comparing myself with this great man or any other. I Use this expression to convey the idea of the many people who’ve contributed their work to the Flowstone community –all the great flowstoners who have created and freely shared their work for others to use, to help build their dream projects.
We all use the resources that others have worked hard to provide, often combining them in novel and innovative ways. In this way our work gets progressively better as time goes by. But, without these wizards’ generosity of spirit and advanced capabilities, much of what I have been able to produce so far would be far more limited in nature and quality.
Flowstone uses a toolbox metaphor for holding and compartmentalising elements and modules which can be dragged into a schematic. The default toolbox, following installation, contains all the available low- level “primitives” and many ready-to-go modules; sufficient to be able to make good stuff right away. However, this can be extended indefinitely to add community-made modules, DSP code, Ruby code and optimised assembler and this turns the application into a real Aladdin’s cave of possibilities. So, if you see something good offered up, or in someone’s uploaded project, you just save it to the toolbox for later use. One consequence of this is that, unless the author puts a signature inside their module, it’s pretty much impossible to recall who made it in the first place.
Some extendible applications have users who charge for their extensions, plugins or whatever, but very happily this doesn’t seem to be the flowstoners’ way.
In conclusion I want to say a HUGE thank you to all those Flowstone wizards whose work I have made use of –far too many to mention even if I could know all of them. And thank you to those who have helped and guided me and others directly in our quest to realise what we dream up.