Jitter/Max/MSP/Jitter/Vizzie Slabs and Shaders

I am feeling frustrated with the lack of understanding of Jitter/Max/MSP/Vizzie. I am hoping that we can have a little more of an overview of the program(s) and what even the differences between the three of them are? y are they rolled into one app? and which is the best to use for which situation?

I am unable to get the slab objects to work in the jitter2011.1 patch, but have a few patches saved which attempt to add new shaders to your work. I tried to understand a little more about the slab and shaders by checking out the "Jitter Tutorial 42 - Slabs and Data Processing on the GPU" (found both online and within Max) . I loaded several of the Color shaders to the demo videos the tutorial accesses to see what effects they added. Many of the Color shaders did not seem to visibly affect the movie clips, but I took screen shots of the effects which did...

Tutorial's default cf.emboss.jxs, cc.scalebias.jxs


cc.grgb2rgba.jxs, cc.planemap.jxs


cc.saturate.ip.jxs

co.inverse.jxs