Needs more docs!
Specifically - I'd like to grab an image from the intranodes and do some image processing on it.
Ok, so the first example is using
var img = http://some.url.jpg
and it displays as the result in "Image Viewer". But - the img is still a string in my code. And the displayed image is small - can I make it bigger? How? Can I get to that data that the Tonic environment clearly has at this point? Can I force (or advise) the Image viewer to display bigger, or query it for the image data? What kind of control do I have over that output?
(Alternatively - Can I upload/embed an image in a notebook? that is, without converting it to text and pasting it or other workarounds?)
More docs, more examples, please. I am sure this can do all sorts of cool things, but how to make it do so is very non-obvious.
Tom Bortels
shared this idea
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AdminRoss Boucher
(Admin, Tonic)
commented
You're absolutely right, we need more documentation. It's something we'll be working on. To quickly sort of address your image question, it's helpful to sort of generally think about how Tonic works.
At the end of a block of code, you get the result of some expression. In your example, it's a string that happens to be a URL. What Tonic does is look at any given object and ask, what's the most useful way for me to represent this to the user. So, in that case, we try fetching the URL, see its an image, and show you the image.
But, Tonic isn't really trying to "write code" for you (at least, not yet). So, you still just have a string. The idea is, roughly, that now that you've seen what you have, you would say, oh ok this is an image url, I'll grab my favorite http library and request the data at that URL and then pass it along to my favorite image processing library.
As you've already pointed out, its not that hard to imagine ways we could maybe start to automate some of that for you. Long term that's really interesting, but short term it's probably a bit beyond our immediate scope.