When I started to make the screencasts about Perl and Padre I had a choice. I could go with the one-shot approach or I could create several pieces (e.g. screencast, filming myself, voice-over, etc) and then combine them together. The former was the easier as I did not have to do any post processing. The latter could (potentially) be a lot more interesting for the viewer.
In then end I tried both approaches. In order to handle the more complex one I needed a video editor. As I am using Ubuntu on my desktop I found KDEnlive as the leading application for that. So I had to learn it. I could think of two approaches: 1) Learn the whole application menu item after menu item, effect after effect 2) Learn the few specific effects I wanted to use The former is a bigger investment but will provide me with a lot more power to make changes. It will give me actual understanding of the whole process. The latter seems to be a lot faster but without seeing more than what I need immediately. It also had the slight problem that I did not really know what are the possibilities and what are the names for those things. In the end I was switching between the two approaches. Trying to do specific tasks and then exploring things around the specific menu items. The biggest problem was that I was new to both KDEnlive and to the whole world of video editing. I did not even know most of the vocabulary they used. I did not know what to expect from the various menu items and effects. It was unclear to me what is the meaning of each menu item and I was somewhat worried that if I used them incorrectly they would ruin my project. I created backups of my raw files but once I managed to do some work I started to be worried that I might make some changes that will render my previous success unusable. If I had an assurance that I can always undo all the changes I made, I think that would make me feel better. I know that's where version control could help but I was not thinking about that. As it was unclear to me what should I expect with each menu item I never really knew if I got the expected behavior, encountered a bug of KDEnlive or just did not use the feature correctly. It was especially interesting as some of the features were interacting with each other. I was looking for documentation and for tutorials but somehow I could not find either of those. At least not from the application itself and not on the web site of KDEnlive. It would have been nice if there were tutorials. Both text with screenshots and screencasts for doing common tasks. Maybe for doing simple projects. Maybe showing each effect and explaining what should I look for in the result. So why am I writing this on the Padre mailing list? There is a lot of analogy. After all Padre is also just an environment to edit file. I am wondering what kind of help we should provide to the new users of Padre? I can see two main groups: 1) People with Perl experience but new to Padre 2) People who are new both to Padre and Perl The former group probably needs a lot less education and they probably need explanations on the advanced aspects of Padre. (e.g. project management) The latter group needs a tutorial that introduces them to Perl and Padre at the same time. Doing little tasks and showing them where Padre ends and where Perl starts. We also need to make sure people find these tutorial very quickly. So I thought of 1) Add a section called "Tutorial" to the main web site that will be divided to "Padre for experienced Perl programmers" and "Learning Padre and Perl" 2) We could start adding articles (with screenshots) and screencasts to both of these - we already have some material. 3) In Padre add a menu item "Help -> Tutorial" that will bring people to the main Tutorial page. 4) When someone starts Padre for the first time show a popup message telling about this tutorial and how to find it later *Help -> Tutorial" What do you think about all this? regards Gabor -- Gabor Szabo http://szabgab.com/ _______________________________________________ Padre-dev mailing list Padre-dev@perlide.org http://mail.perlide.org/mailman/listinfo/padre-dev
