I thought it could be areally fun to make a little modular shader design tool in codea and realized i could use the direct string technique of loading the shader from a block of code labeled as a variable. i then noted it was easy to combine the blocks of code using the lua string functions. i think it wouldnt be too much of a stretch to make a little modular shader design tool in codea. have simple math functions as nodes or blocks that can be dragged and dropped quickly and their values set via sliders/color editors etc… like a combination of what they do on shaderfrog and on theshaderbook.
I also wanted to see if there was any posted forum code that could be used to quickly make an editor akin to glslsandbox.com inside codea. I love the way the code floats transparently atop the full screen shader.
I will post my test code here in a moment, it just shows that this works using a broken appart shader from the built in library assembled by the string formatting methods of lua.
I also thought it would be really cool if I could figure out a way to programatically sort through shader code and make uniforms for them tied to sliders. it looks like you can search strings, so I suppose if I searched the shader block and parsed each uniform, creating appropriate grouped sliders / xy pads / color pickers for each.