Thanks so much Catherine, That is great feedback.
The speed of the video is definitely a challenge that will need to be addressed. Too slow and you would be less inclined to watch it as a refresher (yeah, yeah I know - let's get to the point), too fast and you hit the cognitive wall (what wazzzat?). Currently, repeated viewing has been suggested as a solution if you don't get the concepts at first; which is exactly what you did. One of the test we should run is on the speed of the animation. Perhaps there could be more than one choice of speed, depending on the user's need. Conjugate is not a familiar function for many, so it gives me a chance to exercise the lower blackboard in a way that Plus could not. I'm really glad to hear that the graph was effective. The _ is the way to represent a negative value in J and is actually considered part of the number. Eventually this would be the subject of another reference video dealing with number types. Which introduces a question of whether it is better to have many focussed animations (which is the direction I have been going, since it seems more useful in a learning object kind of way), or longer more general animations that cover more aspects of a particular primitive that may be shared with others. The covering up is an interesting point. What I am actually covering is a dissolve (which feels like cognitive noise to me) between the argument and the result. Instead I show the operator that creates the transition. With the dyadic functions such as Plus, it is much easier to put the operator in the middle and have the arguments collide behind. I haven't yet come up with a way to create meaningful movement of a single argument that scales up to vectors or matrices. Let me know if any ideas occur to you. For now, my quick fix would be to shorten the time that the operator covers the argument, but that gets us back to your original observation about the speed of the animation. :) Cheers, bob On -Mar11-2010, at -Mar11-20103:28 PM, Catherine Lathwell wrote: > I find it frustrating to have the numbers covered by the green +. I believe > you are doing this movement to indicate that the operation is actually > happening... which is good, but I get seriously irritated because it > obstructs what I'm looking at. Maybe you can think of another way - or > maybe make the Green + transparent so I can still see the numbers or > something. I can't really think of a solution, but I did feel a strong > negative reaction to the covering up of the numbers. > > Perhaps when you guys look at something, you know what it is, so you see it > right away. It takes a few beats for me to figure out what's going on, so I > would be happier if everything was just a tad slower. > > If you watch TV and count during the shot changes, the shortest shot is > roughly 3 seconds. You can use this time frame as a rough guide, because > we're trained (by TV) to taking in a shot in 3 seconds. (Use this info > however you like) > > What's the deal with the _ character? Is this how J works these days? I'm > not really up on the J vocabulary, so I didn't understand conjugate before > this... so it took me a couple of runs to figure out that it's *minus *you > mean. My first few rounds, I was scratching my head trying to figure out > what the heck you need an underscore in your number for. > > The graphs, by the way, are excellent. What I mean by this is that it is > the graphs that taught me conjugate. > > C > > On Thu, Mar 11, 2010 at 12:37 AM, bob therriault <[email protected]>wrote: > >> And of course if there is a first version of conjugate, a second soon >> appears. Viewable at http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Vocabulary/plus >> >> Cheers, bob >> >> On -Mar10-2010, at -Mar10-20104:48 PM, bob therriault wrote: >> >>> Moving on a bit. >>> >>> Conjugate was the obvious choice for a monadic verb. The monadic verbs >> introduce some new challenges, not to mention the length of negative >> imaginary numbers and the different combination that can occur. >>> You can watch the results at: >> http://www.jsoftware.com/jwiki/Vocabulary/plus As usual, I await >> comments. >>> >>> Cheers, bob >>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >>> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm >> >> ---------------------------------------------------------------------- >> For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm >> > > > > -- > Catherine Lathwell > http://www.aprogramminglanguage.com > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
