Crafting a tube with stained glass instead of regular glass gets you a set of tubes of the same color. Color tubes behave like standard tubes but will not connect to tubes of other colors (except for standard tubes).
In addition to everything normal Filters do, Osmosis Filters will also automatically draw items from an inventory their input plate faces at the same rate as a hopper. Automatic item extracting respects the Filter's filter and can be disabled with redstone
Tubing Pliers can connect two tube blocks together., forming a longer tube. For routing purposes, tubes connected in this way are considered to be one block apart.
Shunts are an item-handling block that can accept any item and instantly shunt those items to their output side. Shunts do not count as tubes for tube-network-routing purposes. Shunts cannot shunt items into shunts.
Filters work similarly to shunts, except that they can be set to only accept one kind of item. The filter slot can be filled by right-clicking the filter; the four side-faces allow access to the filter slot via item-handling blocks.
This is how you get tubes
Right-click the Loader with an Itemstack to load the itemstack into whatever inventory block the Loader is facing (or to eject the stack if not facing anything). The Loader cannot accept items in any other manner.
When the Extractor receives a redstone signal, it extracts an itemstack from an inventory block on the wide end and shunts it to the narrow end.
Redstone Tubes emit a full redstone signal while items are inside them and emit no signal while items aren't inside them
Items entering the face of a distributor will be ejected to neighboring item handlers sequentially. If there are no neighboring item-handling blocks, the item will be ejected from the opposite side of the Distributor.