The previous section walked you through the steps of creating a simple composition. By now, you may know a bit about the process of composing with Vuo, but you may not understand exactly how compositions work or how make your own from scratch. This section introduces the major concepts you need to understand when working with Vuo. The sections after this — How events and data travel through a composition, How compositions process data, and How nodes can be used as building blocks — go into more detail about these concepts. By the end of the section that follows — Putting it all together in a composition — you should be amply prepared to create your own compositions.
When musicians create a piece of music, they call it a composition. When you create something in Vuo, that’s also called a composition.
In the Quick Start section, you saw how to create a composition that displays some text in a window and twirls the text around. That’s one type of Vuo composition — an animation that displays in a window. Vuo can be used to create much more complex and interesting animations. It can also be used to create many other types of compositions. A composition could be a game. It could be an art installation. It could be a controller for stage lighting. It could be digital signage. It could be a plug-in for other software. Those are just some examples of what a composition could be.
A composition is a program whose source code is a visual representation of the program's data flow. It's compiled and linked to create an application or library.
One thing that all compositions have in common is the process of creating them in the Vuo Editor. Just like in the Quick Start section, you start with either a blank canvas or an existing composition, and you pick out building blocks and connect them to make many smaller pieces work together as a larger whole.
Another thing that all compositions have in common is the way that they run. When you click the Run button in the Vuo Editor, all of those building blocks and connections that you laid out as a blueprint get turned into a running application.